1962

Next week, the term starts at West Virginia University's branch of Osher Life-Long Learning. Both Joe and I are teaching ambitious six-week classes. His is called "Old Testament Rituals: Don't Try These At Home." Mine is called "Great Hits of 1962." I've already taught four-week classes on the top 40 hits of 1960 and 1961. I've expanded to six-weeks to include the Country, R&B, Album and Adult Contemporary (formerly Easy Listening) charts.

Most of the people in my class were in high school in 1962, so this music will resonate with them. My classes have been popular and well-reviewed. I was in seventh and eighth grade in 1962. I had my bar mitzvah, my voice changed (after my bar mitzvah); I got braces. I was tiny, but just starting to grow, and new kids, annexed in seventh grade, joined us in eighth. I tried to be friends with them, and eventually succeeded, more in ninth grade than eighth. In eighth I tried and failed to be a clown, and the new kids had established friendships among themselves going back to elementary school.

I was in the top class in seventh grade, after not being in that class in fifth and sixth. I was a whiz at our thrice-weekly Hebrew school, winning "Best Student" in sixth grade. But in seventh, in the top class, deluged with homework, I found it hard to keep up. My seventh-grade classmates included Rodger Kamenetz, the author of "The Jew In The Lotus" and other books. He started a Jewish Studies Program at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, and later at the New Orleans campus. In eighth grade, we were joined by Wendy Sherman, who became Assistant Secretary of State under Hillary Clinton. I often think that my class at Sudbrook Junior High in Pikesville, Maryland was the smartest class in the history of Baltimore County Junior High Schools. If I'm right about that, then I was the dumbest one in that class. Not to mention an undiagnosed ADD case.

Mrs. Crain, our seventh grade CORE teacher, had us keep a notebook of assignments, in order, to turn in after a few weeks. While others turned in perfectly well-ordered folders of material, all I had was a handful of half-finished assignments. Mrs. Crain asked for a conference with my parents. She didn't believe me when I told her they refused to come in. She had my mother write a letter explaining why she couldn't come in. In the letter, my mother promised to help me with my schoolwork, which she never did.

Outside of my own life, the big issue I remember from 1962 was civil rights. Baltimore was still fully segregated, down to the weekday afternoon teen dance show, The Buddy Dean Show, which had African-American kids on alternate Fridays as "special guests." People who have seen some iteration of "Hairspray," based on the Buddy Dean Show, think that was made up. Our synagogue had stopped sponsoring trips to Gwynn Oak Park, the amusement park near our house, featured in "Hairspray" (filmed elsewhere as Gwynn Oak was torn down before the original "Hairspray") because they wouldn't allow African-Americans to go there. Diplomats from newly-independent African countries were refused lunch at restaurants on US 40 between Baltimore and Wilmington, while on their way to the United Nations in New York, creating  international incidents. President Kennedy pushed up the schedule to build Interstate 95 to bypass those towns. Maryland House Restaurant was planned to be in the median of the highway, designed to be integrated. The road, now called Kennedy Expressway, opened in November, 1963, just before Kennedy was assassinated.

I took dance lessons in the spring of 1962. I learned the waltz, fox trot, cha-cha and mambo, my mother's idea being that I could dance with my grandmother at my bar mitzvah party. As it was, because it was a luncheon on Saturday afternoon, my Orthodox grandmother vetoed live music. My bar mitzvah was on October 27, the day the Cuban missile crisis was resolved. This was the first time I bargained with God. "Okay," I said, "There will be a nuclear war and we will all die. But can I please have my bar mitzvah first?"

For those of us living in suburban America, with two parents working before that was the norm, life was good. My parents paid $75 a month on their mortgage, they had a beautiful 1961 Oldsmobile convertible, which cost about $1500. They were still young and attractive at thirty-four and forty; my father had his first toupée. Aside from the usual issues of being twelve and thirteen, my life was good.

In music, too, this was a peak year for American pop music, before the British Invasion. This was the music Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger were hearing in England. Lines were being crossed in popular music. African-American Ray Charles' album "Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music" hit all the charts. Chubby Checker, Dee Dee Sharp, and The Orlons, all from Philadelphia, crossed over to the Top 40 charts with dance hits "The Twist," "Mashed Potato Time" and "The Watusi." African-American owned record company Motown had hits by The Marvelettes, The Countours, The Miracles and Mary Wells. Jewish Artists like Neil Sedaka scored with "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do," and Jewish composers like Carole King and Gerry Goffin had hits with "Up On The Roof" for The Drifters and "The Locomotion" for their babysitter, Little Eva, Burt Bacharach and Hal David wrote "Only Love Can Break A Heart" for Gene Pitney, and Phil Spector produced Pitney's "He's A Rebel" for The Crystals.

Italian-Americans also did well, with the hot new group of the year The Four Seasons, hits by Connie Francis, and Tony Bennett's famous "I Left My Heart In San Francisco."

Country music had Leroy Van Dyke's "Walk On By" and several hits by pint-sized teenager Brenda Lee.

1962 was the year the soundtrack of "West Side Story" topped the charts from May through June 1963, the year of "My Son, The Folk Singer" by Allan Sherman, and the iconic first Peter, Paul and Mary album.

There was American music by and for everyone, in a way presaging the coming of age of the civil rights movement the following year, as kids across America were listening to music by Jews and African-Americans without prejudice.

I'm stoked for this class. 1962 was an era of hope, an era when we thought change might be for the good and our country would be more inclusive and more free.

My class is for six Thursdays from one to three P.M. (followed by Joe's class at three) at Mountaineer Mall, Morgantown, starting September 29. Go to www.olliatwvu.org to sign up.

The Greatest Hits of 1960

I've been teaching at West Virginia University's branch of Osher  Life-Long Learning since the fall of 2013, usually one class in the fall session. I started with a two-part class about The Brill Building, based on the book Always Magic In The Air, The Bomp and Brilliance of The Brill Building, by Ken Emerson. He features seven sets of songwriters who worked in New York in the late fifties and early sixties, including Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, Carole King and Jerry Goffin, and Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield.

I've taught six-week classes about the history of Motown and the British invasion in the late sixties. My last class, this past fall, was called "The Beach Boys: Light and Dark." That one made me an emotional wreck. Even I didn't know how much "Dark" there was in their story. All of my classes have been well-received and reviewed. I have something of a following.

I normally don't teach in the winter, partly because classes are postponed if public schools are closed, which last winter was eighteen days out of thirty scheduled. This year they made the term four weeks instead of six so there could be time to make up missed classes before spring session starts. I decided to teach so I could be present during my election campaign. Today is the fourth week, and we have held every class on time. We lost classes early in the week last week and two weeks before that because of snow storms. They are being made up.

I have a book that lists the top 40 songs of every year from 1900 to 1999. The author, Joel Whitburn, has an obsession with pop music, which I suppose I can relate to. I picked 1960, and decided to cover Whitburn's biggest hits at a rate of ten each week. This has been great fun for me.

In 1960, I was in fifth and sixth grade. We had "Pre-teen Center" dances at Campfield Elementary School every Friday night during the school year. It started out being square dancing for kids, but   the kids preferred pop music, so we did some square dancing and then danced to pop music. I usually danced with Margo King, who I think of as my first girlfriend, or Nanette Birmingham, who sat next to me in sixth grade.  Two of the songs I remember were chart hits for Jimmy Jones, now nearly forgotten, in 1960. They were "Handy Man" (later covered by James Taylor) and "Good Timin.'" I also remember the fuss over Elvis returning from the Army. People in the class have their memories, too. One woman, originally from Philadelphia, had posters of local heroes Bobby Rydell and Fabian up in her room as a teenager.

One difference from my past classes is that I am only using YouTube to play music. It seems my vast collection of recorded music on vinyl, cassette and CD is officially obsolete. I don't download music or subscribe to streaming services, but everything you want to hear is on YouTube. (As I'm writing this,  I'm listening to Radiohead's "In Rainbows" from 2008) on headphones attached to an antique portable CD player).

My students are mostly a bit older than I, and we all get a kick out of clips of artists, some looking terrified, lip-synching to their own records in front of a bunch of giggly girls and pompaded boys on Dick Clark's Beech-Nut Hour. The kids are all chewing Beech-Nut gum and wearing buttons that say "IFIC, short for  "flavorific," how the gum is described.

Some of these artists look impossibly young, but Brenda Lee and Kathy Young were fifteen, Brian Hyland sixteen. Some of the artists were already famous, like Elvis Presley, some, like Brenda Lee, Connie Francis, Paul Anka, Chubby Checker and Roy Orbison were just getting started, some, like Dion, changed styles completely after 1960, others like Percy Faith, who had the biggest hit of the year with "Theme From A Summer Place" seemed old-fashioned for the times, yet kept going, doing the same thing, for many years.

I've learned about "The Nashville Sound," having a string orchestra and chorus behind a country music vocalist, a more "urban" sound than one would expect. I've also seen how the separate chart for "R&B" music was about to become obsolete, with crossover artists like Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, and Ray Charles.

It's sad sometimes to watch videos of these young artists, knowing that some of them died in drug overdoses, or car accidents, or that, like all of us, are not the brash young people they were. This class has given us all a chance to go back to "those thrilling days of yesteryear" and remember who we were then, who we idolized, who we danced with, who was our crush, or even how our (mostly late) parents screamed "Turn that noise down!" at us.

I'm teaching a four-week class in April and May on the top hits of 1961.