They Brought New Year Eve into Our Homes

Workers hand time a mid-century Ball drop in Times Square.

Well, December 31 is New Year’s Eve.  It is a designated night of revelry, semi-respectable over-indulgence, and general tom foolery.  It is also considered amateur night by bartenders and regular imbibers. Many of the latter actually avoid going out because the amateurs are rowdy, annoying, likely to puke on their shoes, and frankly dangerous.

Like all holidays and celebrations, New Year’s Eve has its customs.  Just three days ahead of time in 1897 Irish-American brass band leader Patrick S. Gilmore—John Philipps Sousa’s great rival—obtained the first permit for a public New Year’s Eve Celebration in New York City ushering in regular public revelry and music.  Ten Years later the first illuminated ball was dropped at Midnight from the flagpole atop the New York Times building.  After that the Big Apple was New Year’s Eve headquarters for the entire country.

For those of us of a certain age, that included welcoming the New Year from home with Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians first on radio and later on television.  Parents would let kids stay up—or try to stay up—and blow on noisemakers and drink sparkling grape juice at midnight in New York as the band struck up its traditional rendition of Auld Lang Syne.

Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadias ruled the radio and Television airwaves for 41 years playing Auld Lang Syne at the stroke of midnight in New York.

Lombardo was born in 1902 in London, Ontario, Canada, one of five sons of an immigrant Italian family.  His father was an amateur singer and had each of his sons learn an instrument to accompany him in an informal family band.  Guy’s first public performance was at a church party when he was 12 years old.  Lombardo and his brothers formed their own orchestra and were playing professionally on both sides of the international border by 1920.

In 1922 Lombardo made his first recordings at the Gennett Studios in Richmond, Indiana.  Soon the orchestra, now dubbed the Royal Canadians, was ensconced in the Roosevelt Grill of New York City’s Roosevelt Hotel.  They played there for more than thirty years.  Like other big city hotel bands, Lombardo’s orchestra was soon making regular live radio broadcasts.  It was a dance band, only lightly touched by jazz.  While contemporaries like Paul Whiteman were adapting their music to the public’s developing taste for jazz and later Big Band Swing, Lombardo continued to play what he called the Sweetest Music this Side of Heaven.  The band’s immediately recognizable signature sound was a lead saxophone section featuring a wide vibrato.

Lombardo first broadcast a New Year’s Eve program on CBS Radio on December 31, 1928.  He continued broadcasting from the Roosevelt Room until 1959, and then moved his base to the larger Waldorf Astoria.  In 1959 the New Year’s Eve program was first aired on CBS Television and continued on that network for 21 years.

After the move to television, the show included coverage from Times Square for the countdown to the Midnight Ball Drop as described first by legendary broadcaster Robert Trout and then by Ben Grower.  As soon as the ball would hit the bottom Lombardo would strike up the familiar strains of Auld Lang Syne and the cameras would cut between the proletarian mob in Times Square and the elegant revelers in tuxedos and evening gowns in the hotel ballroom.

Guy Lombardo died in 1977 having done 41 annual New Year’s broadcasts.  His brothers kept the orchestra together for a while and the show continued on CBS for two more years.

Dick Clark bundled up to host New Year's in 1988.  Clark may be gone but his production company empire still controles the most popular New Year's program and closely follows the format he created.  Eternally boyish Ryan Seacrest has just replaced eternally boyish Clark.

Dick Clark, already a well-established TV legend for his long running American Bandstand program launched his Rockin’ New Year’s Eve broadcasts from Times Square on December 31, 1972 on NBC.  Lombardo was still the king of the night, but his music was old fashion even for most of his faithful adult listeners.  The first Clark broadcast included pre-recorded performances by Three Dog Night, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Helen Reddy, and Al Green with cutaways to Clark in a studio overlooking Times Square for the Countdown.

The broadcast moved to ABC after two years and has dominated the night ever since.  After Clark suffered a stroke in 2004 primary hosting duties were performed first by Regis Philbin and then by Ryan Seacrest, best known as the host for American Idol.  Clark returned for appearances on the program, although he remained somewhat impaired by the stroke.

Clark died on April 18, 2012 at age 82.  The program continued as Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve with Ryan Seacrest.  It still dominates all other Network counter programing. This year Jenny McCarthy will co-host and hopefully pass the night without laying her anti-vac delusions on anyone.  Other hosts will keep the party rolling as Midnight rolls West including someone called Ciara in Los Angeles who the entertainment shows assures me is a  multi-platinum artist and super star.    The big headline is that Mariah Carey has been invited back for a chance to redeem herself after last year’s catastrophe, melt-down, and histerical finger pointing.  But she will not be featured in the sweet spot—the last song before the Waterford Crystal Ball drops.  Other scheduled performers include Havana singer Camila Cabello, Nick Jonas, and Sugarland.

  Other networks and Cable stations have their own New Year’s programming.  CNN’s program has become a cult favorite because comedienne Katy Griffith was always expected to say something vulgar and outrageous while newsman Anderson Cooper cringed.  But Griffith was dropped like a radio-active hot potato after she posted a prank photo of herself holding what looked like Donald Trump’s severed head by the hair.  She can no hardly get work in the states and has received so many death threats that she fears to work in the States anyway.  She will be replaced by celebrity gossip monger Andy Cohn best known for breathless coverage of Kardasians and Real Housewives. 

Joining the fray are other cable networks and local stations across the country broadcasting from local hotels or municipal fireworks extravaganzas usually anchored by the Sports Guy and the best looking weather babe and/or local radio shock jocks.  Except in major cities expect to see the very best cover bands available.

This year security in Times Square and at other big gatherings around the country will be super tight following various high profile attacks in Europe this year.  In the past already tight security included welding manhole covers shut, removing all trash cans and mail Boxes, and even banishing port-a-poties for the over one million revelers who will jam the area.  There is extensive video surveillance and sophisticated facial recognition software will be used on faces in the crowd.  New this year are enormous dump trucks filled with sand blocking intersections to prevent a suicide truck attack.  Other new wrinkles are a closely guarded secret.

No wonder millions just stay home to watch the whole thing on the tube.

New Year’s is not quite the big night out it used to be.  Strict drunk driving enforcement has discouraged many drinkers from going out while publicity about highway mayhem deters moderate drinkers and teetotalers.  It has been surpassed as a party night out by both St. Patrick’s Day and Halloween.  But the evenings still is a huge money maker for hotels, nightclubs, and bars.  Many cities have midnight fireworks.  Non-alcoholic, family centered events called First Night have developed a following in many locations as an alternative to the traditional revelry.

This will not be me this year or a year or any other.

As for me, I’ll be pulling the overnight shift at the gas station/convenience store down the street from the house.  It is the first year we have been licensed to sell beer so I am expecting a lively evening.  It will be cold a shit to night adding to the festivities.  I hope no one pukes or passes out in the bathrooms.

Happy New Year to you, too.

A Brazen Act of Bold Defiance—The Flint Sit-Down Strike

United Auto Workers members at Fisher Body Plant #1 made themselves at home inside when they learned General Moters was trying to sneak critical dies out ot the plant in advance of a strike planned after the first of the year.

Eighty years ago today the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1937, the great heroic event in the unionization of the American auto industry, broke out.  Previous attempts to organize by AFL craft unions and by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) had failed to make permanent inroads.  The new United Auto Workers (UAW), an industrial union organized on lines similar the IWW and backed by John L. Lewis’s Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), had built scattered locals but had yet made no real headway in organizing the industry.  Many thought the new union would fail.

The union decided to target General Motors for a major organizing drive by striking its two Fisher Body plants in Cleveland, Ohio and Flint, Michigan.  By cutting off the supply of auto bodies, they could quickly shut down all GM production.  Besides, the union had its strongest support at Fisher.  

Self-organized as the Women's Emergency Brigade, the wives, mothers, and sisters of strkers played a critical part in the struggle from bring food to be passed through plant windows to forming mass picket lines to confront company scabs and goons.

When the company got wind of plans to strike after New Year’s 1937, it started stripping essential stamping dies from the Flint plant to be sent to Cleveland.  On December 30 local leaders at the Flint #1 plant called a hasty lunch-hour meeting and decided to launch a sit-down strike, occupying the plant and preventing the dies from being moved.  The IWW had pioneered the sit-down strike at Briggs Auto and Murray Body in 1933, so the workers were aware of the tactic.

Workers set up cots, elected a “mayor” and council to run things, and got support from wives and family members who passed food through the plant windows.  The union governing committee ignored repeated injunctions to end the strike and repelled an attempt by police to re-take the factory by force on January 11 by turning fire hoses on them.  The strike spread to Chevrolet #4 and was attracting national attention.  

The virtually universal history of National Guard intervention in American labor struggles was as a heavy handed, and sometime lethal, reinforcements for company goons, posses, vigilantes, and local police in attacking workers.  New Deal Michiga Governor Frank Murphy called up the Guard with entirely different instructions--to protect strikers and their supporters from attacks by company goon squads.  They effectively prevented another attempt to take the plant by force after a January 11 assault was repelled by the workers. Here they stand by as food and milk is delivered to the strikers through a window..

Newly inaugurated Michigan Governor Frank Murphy, a New Deal Democrat elected with strong labor support, called up the National Guard not to attack the strikers, but to defend them from scabs and goon squads being organized by the company.

As production at all facilities ground to a halt, the company was forced to enter negotiations with John L. Lewis speaking for the UAW since the company refused to be in the same room with UAW leaders.  On February 11 the company signed a one-page agreement recognizing the UAW as the bargaining agent of its members for the next six months. 

Celebrating victory after almost a month and a half of occupying the plant.

On the strength of this victory the UAW signed up more than 100,000 more GM workers and enforced conditions by local grievance walkouts across the country.  Eventually other automakers, including highly resistant Ford, also recognized the union.