Shooting stars

Bobby Rydell takes a drag on his cigarette right before our filmed 1968 interview for AFTV Spangdahlem's Friday-night "Catch-22" series.

I watched the Malt Shop Memories Concert on PBS the other night, and I had two reactions: irritation and sadness.

Both emotions were caused by the same factor. There are performers who should stop performing when they can no longer get the job done.

The concert was taped April 1, 2011, at Caesars in Atlantic City, N.J. and featured performances by Frankie Avalon, Bobby Rydell, Fabian, The Drifters, Little Anthony & The Imperials, Lesley Gore, Brian Hyland, Chris Montez, The Angels, The Tymes, and Little Peggy March. (Click on the names in this paragraph and hear their 1960s hits on YouTube.)

If you were a teenager in the pre-Beatles 1960s, those people are familiar. They all had hit songs back in the day when rock and roll was a more innocent genre. Most of them were teenagers themselves then and are at least in their 60s now.

I can't think of a one of them who's had a hit since.

Most of them just shouldn't be singing any more. They just can't cut the mustard. That was sad to watch. But I was irritated with myself for once more succumbing to nostalgia's lure.

"Keep reaching for that elusive note, Frankie. Maybe you'll stumble across it eventually."

Little Anthony was an exception. He might be 45 years older, but he can still hit every note on the mark. So can Lesley Gore and Bobby Rydell.

Keep in mind that, even in their prime, most of these performers were blessed with more enthusiasm than talent. They looked good. They reflected their times. They had sex appeal.

But, to be truthful, their material wasn't very challenging. Add to that the fact that what we heard on the radio were the very best takes of what were probably lengthy recording sessions, backed up by talented studio musicians and equally talented recording engineers.

In live performances back in the day, it wasn't their musical ability that attracted audiences of screaming teenage girls. It was the fact that they were, momentarily, rock and roll "stars."

More like shooting stars, really. They shone brightly, and then faded and fell to earth.

PBS television taped the concert back in April for one of its endless series of fundraisers aimed at us old folks who used to be young in the 1960s and now have enough money to help support public television.

Most of those programs leave me feeling cheated. But idiot that I am, I TiVo-ed this one anyway, thinking it might be worth seeing. It was a two-hour program. By the time I skipped the pledge breaks and the parts that were just plain lame, it took me about 20 minutes to watch.

I interviewed Bobby Rydell back in 1968 when he was on a USO tour of Germany and appeared at the NCO Club at Spangdahlem Air Base. As we were setting up the camera and chatting with him, one of the crew asked him how he liked being a superstar.

"I'm just a guy from Philly who got lucky," he said. "Please don't call me a superstar."

He was right. And all these years later, I still respect him for saying it.

How to beat the heat

The weather here in Richmond this summer has been brutal -- not all of the time, but often enough.

The end is near -- the end of summer, I mean, not that other end.

The heat and humidity today prompted me to prowl around the Internets looking for suggestions on how to stay cool. I made a list, and threw in a few of my own suggestions, too.

Here's the list, in no particular order.

Store your underwear in the freezer. Wear only frozen underwear, nothing else at all, when you are home alone.

Keep your curtains and blinds closed. (In addition to keeping out the heat, this keeps the neighbors from seeing you in your frozen underwear.)

Place a shallow bowl of ice in front of a fan and enjoy the breeze.

Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. Then drink lots of water.

Take a tip from my cat: Sit quietly and do nothing.

Open the fridge door. Stand in front of it.

Eat a cold watermelon.

Turn on the lawn sprinkler. Walk through the spray.

Cook with your microwave instead of your stove.

Read "White Fang" or watch "March of the Penguins."

Go to the park. Buy a Sno-Ball.

Move v-e-r-y slowly if at all.

Go to a movie theater.

Take a cold shower. Stay naked for a while afterwards.

Do not wear a tie.

Fill a plastic baby pool with fresh water. Put it under a shade tree. Lie down in it.

Tie a cold cloth around your neck.

Wet your hair.

Eat something spicy hot. It can cause an endorphin rush that is quite pleasant and might make you forget the heat.

Lie down on the floor. It's the coolest part of the house, unless you have a basement. If you do have a basement, spend some time down there.

Turn off the lights. The bulbs produce heat.

Slice a thin piece of cold cucumber (from the fridge) and stick it in the middle of your forehead.

Do not try to fan yourself. It just makes you hotter.

Do not drink coffee, tea or beer. They make you pee, which dehydrates you.

Sleep naked.

My 99-cent stick

It began life as a 99-cent stick that I found in a cardboard box at the grocery store about 10 years ago.

It didn't look like much, just a foot-long dry twig with bare roots. The hand-written sign on the box said "Crape Myrtles -- 99 cents."

I figured, what the heck. How wrong can I go for 99 cents?

So I added it to my cart.

My mother had always told me that the right time to buy any sort of flowering bush was when it was in bloom, so that I could see exactly what color it would be. (This was of prime importance to her because she had once bought an azalea, not in bloom, that was labeled "Hershey Red" to replace one that had died in a row of Hershey Red azaleas along the front of the house. It turned out to be the wrong shade of red. She never got over it.)

I had always followed her advice in this regard. But I took a chance on the crape myrtle stick.

I was surprised when it flourished. It grew about a foot the first year. Then it began to really shoot up, and by the third year it started producing blossoms.

I was surprised again. I had never seen a crape myrtle with blooms like this. Each tiny blossom was bright pink in the center and white at the edges. The effect was like the colors in a Christmas candy cane. Today, it's about 15 feet tall and produces a profusion of blossoms.

Crape myrtles are ubiquitous in Richmond. I have about a half-dozen mature crape myrtles in my yard -- lavender, pink, red and burgundy. (I despise white crape myrtles and azaleas; when the blooms begin to die they look like discarded Kleenex.)

I asked around among my friends. Nobody had ever seen a red and white crape myrtle. I began to pay close attention to crape myrtle trees in my summertime travels. Nope, no red and white crape myrtles. So far, I've never seen another one like mine.

Finally I Googled crape myrtle varieties. There on the Texas AgriLife Extension Service site, run by Texas A&M University, I found a picture of a crape myrtle like mine. Appropriately enough, it's called Peppermint Lace.

You can buy a Peppermint Lace crape myrtle on Amazon and other sites.

They cost about six times more than I paid for my bare-root stick.

In the summer, in the city

Virginia Museum designers created a T-shirt each year for the museum's summer concert series. Most featured art from the VMFA collection, such as this 1986 version with an image of artist Barry Flanagan's "Large Leaping Hare" sculpture.

Staging an outdoor event in Richmond's notoriously sweltering summers can be tricky, as David Griffith found out back in the early 1980s.

Griffith was the head of public relations at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts when the museum began its highly successful Jumpin' in July series of Thursday-evening concerts in the Sculpture Garden. (Alas, the Jumpin' series, Griffith, and the Sculpture Garden have all since bit the dust.)

The Sculpture Garden, which opened in 1976 and was demolished during the latest expansion project, might not have been the ideal spot for a July concert series: It was a heat trap. Paved in brick, it was sunk one story below ground level. The sun baked the bricks all day long. During days like today, it was hot -- very hot -- and high brick walls and the museum's North Wing blocked any wayward breeze.

If memory serves me, it was during the second season of the series when Griffith came up with what he considered a bright idea. Late on one sweltering Thursday afternoon, he was in the garden checking on the setup. He'd only been out there for a few minutes, and sweat was pouring down his face.

Griffith's masterstroke of genius was to request the museum's maintenance department to use hoses to spray water on the bricks to cool things down.

You're probably one step ahead of the story by now. If so, you're certainly a step ahead of where Griffith was.

An hour later, at 6 p.m. when the concert began, the water had turned to steam, and the Sculpture Garden wasn't just hot: It was a sauna. Jumpin' in July that evening was a miserable experience for performers and audience alike.

The Jumpin' in July series survived, however, and became so successful that it was extended on both ends, into June and August. The museum dropped "in July" from the name, and the series came to be known simply as "Jumpin'" By its third year, and for many years thereafter, most concerts were sold out. As many as 1,800 people packed the Sculpture Garden for each event -- listening to music, socializing, drinking, and dancing.

The museum had to beef up security to prevent gate-crashing and to keep people from sneaking into the garden. (An overweight young man, wearing only the briefest of leopard-print, bikini-style bathing suits, climbed over the north wall one night; he was a fashion disaster, and the museum's security guards had no trouble spotting him in the crowd and hustling him out quickly.) Security fences had to be put up around outdoor sculptures by Aristide Maillol, Henry Moore and Alexander Calder to keep people from setting their drinks on them. Tickets had to be printed with ultraviolet coding to stop counterfeiting. The museum had to contract with a volunteer rescue squad to keep an ambulance on site each Thursday night.

At least one couple met at a Jumpin' concert and married within a year. A Virginia Air National Guard pilot was seriously disciplined for buzzing the garden in his fighter jet during a concert. (That story made the front page of the next day's paper.)

Jumpin' in July was begun as a way to entice younger people to enjoy the museum. It succeeded beyond the museum's wildest dreams. Jumpin' became the place to be and to be seen on Thursday nights.

Within a few years, Innsbrook, the Science Museum and Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden had begun their own summer concert series. But none was quite as successful as VMFA's.

Before I retired, I managed the ticket desk outside the garden gate for every one of the Jumpin' concerts. It was a job I enjoyed as much as any other during my tenure at VMFA.

The Sculpture Garden was destroyed to make way for construction of the museum's new wing, which opened last year, leaving no venue for Jumpin'.

The last concert was bittersweet.

But ... I no longer had to work at the ticket desk every Thursday evening in the hot summer sun. That was a blessed relief.

Patton and me

I had been a medic at Bitburg Air Base for about two weeks when one of my roommates suggested a trip to Bonn to celebrate the coming new year, 1967.

Bonn, a city on the Rhine River, was the capital of what was then West Germany. It was about as long a trip as it is from Richmond to Washington, D.C.

We all piled into a couple of Volkswagens, drove to Bonn, found a small hotel, and enjoyed the city -- which, since we were GIs, entailed the drinking of mass quantities of the excellent local beer.

In other words, we got drunk every night.

On New Year's Eve, after spending the evening drinking too many liters of Bonn's best, somebody suggested, "Let's go piss in the Rhine. Everybody does it!"

It became a raucous venture that started with us trying to find our way on foot to a bridge across the Rhine. I was more than enthusiastic about going along, but I kept asking why it was a big deal to piss in the Rhine. Nobody seemed to know exactly, but I was assured that it was "tradition."

So there we were, as the city's cathedral bells tolled midnight, lined up along the railing in the middle of a bridge, pissing into the Rhine far below. We weren't the only ones, and it was quite a sight.

It wasn't until a few years later that I discovered why pissing into the Rhine was considered de rigueur.

It was all General George S. Patton's doing. He had promised himself during World War II that he would one day urinate into Germany's most important river.

And Patton kept his promise, in full view of his troops. "I drove to the Rhine River," he said, "and went across on the pontoon bridge. I stopped in the middle to take a piss and then picked up some dirt on the far side in emulation of William the Conqueror."

Patton was nothing if not a colorful character, beloved by the vast majority of his men.

Although I didn't know exactly what we were memorializing on that bridge on December 31, 1967, it was an extraordinary experience. And now that I do know what we were commemorating, I'm doubly glad we paid tribute to Patton, even in our own small and incoherent way.

(Although he was a California native, Patton's family connections to Virginia were strong and went back to before the Civil War. Patton attended Virginia Military Institute for a year before enrolling at West Point, from which he graduated in 1909. He died December 9, 1945, after injuries suffered in an auto accident near Mannheim, Germany. He is buried at the American Military Cemetery in Luxembourg, a place I have visited many times.)

Sultry days and peach ice cream

Niggerfoot.

Even when I was a child the name of the crossroads was shocking.

Peach ice cream made me think about Niggerfoot today.

Bear with me.

Niggerfoot, not even much of a wide spot at the intersection of state routes 54 and 671, was between Ashland and Montpelier in Hanover County. When I was a child, if you wanted to get to the farm where my maternal grandmother lived, you turned right at Niggerfoot. Even in the late 1940s and early 50s, the crossroads was pretty much abandoned. The post office and what was probably a country store were empty and close to falling down.

When I first saw it, the Niggerfoot name was on a black-on-white state sign alongside the two-lane highway.

Once we made the turn to the right, my grandmother's farm was about a quarter mile down a tar-and-gravel road. If you drove a little farther along that road, you'd come to Scotchtown, a farm that dates back to 1717. Scotchtown was where Patrick Henry lived from 1771 to 1778 with his wife and six children, and it was his home during his most influential period in Virginia politics -- when he gave his famous "Give me liberty or give me death" speech at St. John's Episcopal Church here in Richmond and when he was elected Governor of Virginia.

Nobody was living in Henry's old house in the early 1950s, and when we kids would go rambling through the woods around my grandmother's farm, a favorite destination was Scotchtown. (It was still privately owned when I was a kid. It was purchased in 1958 by the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, restored, and turned into a tourist destination.)

But back to Niggerfoot.

As a kid, I always wondered about the origin of the name, but that wasn't something I pursued until today. The crossroads sign is long gone. If you Google the name you'll find mentions of both Niggerfoot and an alternate name, Negro Foot, mainly in family histories of people who lived nearby.

The Niggerfoot version of the name appears to go back at least 150 years. It pops up in a passing mention of Stonewall Jackson's well-known Stonewall Brigade, which is said to have marched down the Niggerfoot Road and attacked the Union Army's right flank at Mechanicsville during the Civil War.

But why that name?

Googling leads only to supposition. I found a handful of 18th- and 19th-century references to cockfighting. Some cocks with one black leg were referred to as "niggerfoot cocks." Perhaps somebody who owned fighting cocks once lived at the crossroads. Or maybe cockfights were held there long, long ago.

But what does all of this have to do with ice cream?

It's hot as Hades in Richmond today. On sultry Sunday afternoons more than a half-century ago, my grandmother's extended family would gather in the shade of a great walnut tree near the farm's modest peach orchard. We kids would have picked peaches from the trees in the morning, and after Sunday dinner, the adults supervised as my cousins and I took turns churning peach ice cream by hand. I remember it as being the best ice cream I ever had.

No, I didn't churn peach ice cream today. But I did buy a pint of Ben and Jerry's Peach Cobbler ice cream on my way home from fitness class this morning.

It won't be as good as what we made at my grandmother's farm. But it will be a pleasant treat this evening.

And that's why peach ice cream prompted memories of the little crossroads once called Niggerfoot.

Venturing beyond the strip malls

Broaddus Flats stretches along either side of Route 360 in present-day Hanover County. It was settled by Colonials in the mid-16th century. It takes its name today from a family that purchased the land in the late 19th century. (Don Dale photo, 2011)

I headed east for about an hour on Route 360 Friday on my way to visit an old friend who lives in King and Queen County. It's a beautiful drive once you leave the Mechanicsville strip malls behind.

A few minutes after you pass the last of the suburban hodgepodge, the road becomes increasingly rural. Then you reach the top of a hill that offers a breathtaking view of a flat stretch of farmland, studded with trees, that reaches some miles to the east, almost as far as the eye can see.

I've loved this view from the top of the hill almost all of my life. When I was a small child, I knew that when we reached that hill we were truly on our way to the Rappahannock River near Center Cross, where we spent summer vacations away from the heat and noise of the city. Once, as a young adult, I rode my Kawasaki motorcycle from Richmond to that cottage on the bluff overlooking the river -- and then back -- which once and for all showed me the wisdom of making the journey by automobile.

It wasn't until the 1980s that I learned the name of the flat expanse of farmland at the bottom of that hill. I was talking about what a beautiful stretch of 360 it was while I was having coffee one morning with a friend in the Café at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

"Oh, you mean Broaddus Flats," my friend said.

Since then I've learned that Virginians have been farming there since just a few decades after the first Englishmen arrived at Jamestown in 1607. In the 1990s, archaeologists began uncovering a mix of both Native American and Colonial American artifacts at digs in Broaddus Flats. (Native Americans lived on this plain adjacent to the Pamunkey River for thousands of years before Europeans arrived.)

The area has had a number of names over the centuries. It was purchased in the late 19th century by a planter named Rowland Broaddus, hence the name by which it's known today.

But even before I knew the history of the place, I knew that the commanding view from the top of the hill always gave me peace and even joy. It marks the end of suburbia and the beginning of a quieter, nobler part of Virginia.

As I reached the top of the hill Friday, it struck me that in all my 68 years I had never taken a picture of Broaddus Flats. I began to scout possible locations where I could stop the car safely and grab a few images of even a small part of this verdant countryside. I spotted a likely place, but it was on the other side of the four-lane highway that bisects Broaddus Flats. I made a mental note that this was where I would stop on the way back home.

After a pleasant visit with my friend in King and Queen County, I headed back to Richmond. The threat of rain hung all about, but only scattered drops fell. I stopped at a roadside stand and brought fresh local tomatoes, a few ears of just-picked corn, a handful of new potatoes and some yellow squash. (Friday night's dinner alone was worth the drive.) As I passed into Broaddus Flats, I drove more slowly and began to look closely for the location I had spotted earlier. There it was, near the long gravel and dirt road leading to the Old Church Hunt Club.

With darkening clouds racing above and raindrops falling intermittently, I finally took pictures of a portion of Broaddus Flats. They're decent images, but they don't do the place justice. I'll try to do better next time.