A Heart Lost and Found in Hot Springs, Arkansas

On a street in Manhattan in 1960, piano player and accompanist Ralph Sharon ran into two songwriters who had been trying to sell him songs for his singer to try out.  As a favor to them, he took one of them, an old song written in 1953, and at home he shoved it into a drawer and forgot about it.  A year later, while packing for a series of gigs across the country, he sees the song and thinks “we’re playing that city later in the tour– maybe we can use this” and sticks it in his suitcase.  

In Hot Springs, Arkansas, they do a singing date in a club called The Vapors, a 60's modern new nightclub  owned by gangster and former Cotton Club owner Owney Madden.  A 15 year old local boy, an aspiring musician, later recalls peeking in the window to see the performance that night.  After the show, Sharon pulls out the song and plays the tune for his singer.  He says, “We’re heading there soon – this might be a good local tune for you to try out.”  They run through the song together at the piano in the bar of the Vapors before an audience of one:  the bartender.  He tells them “If you record that song, I’ll be the first to buy it.” 

In December of 1961, at the Venetian Room of the Fairmount Hotel in San Francisco, the singer performs the song for the first time in public.  He later says “That song helped make me a world citizen.  It allowed me to live, work and sing in any city on the globe.  It changed my whole life.”  

He recorded it the following month, as the B side to another song.  But the disc jockeys liked the B side, it received all the airplay, and it won the Grammy for Record of the Year in 1962.  The song, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco”, became the signature song for the singer, Tony Bennett. The song also made a fortune as well for the two struggling songwriters, George Cory and Douglass Cross, two Bay Area natives who had moved to New York but expressed their longing for home in their city by the bay.

The club where the song was first sung by Tony Bennett did not fare as well.  The state of Arkansas finally cracked down on the illegal gambling that had been tolerated in Hot Springs, and so the illegal casinos were closed.  The Vapors continued on as a nightclub and restaurant, and limped through the disco era into the 1990’s, but the glory days of Hot Springs as a mecca for gamblers, gangsters and baseball players was long gone.  The club closed and the building that was so “Modern” in 1960 was sold in October 1998.  The Tower of Strength Ministries moved in and held church services for years in the building, on the highway leading into the town.  The iconic sign remained, proclaiming the current occupant.  

In 2020, the club re-opened as a performance venue, the Legendary Vaporshttps://www.thelegendaryvapors.com/, but has been temporarily closed due to the coronavirus outbreak.  The building is a survivor.  Let's hope it can weather the storm. 

And the budding 15 year old musician who was peering in the windows that night?  

His musical career did not really take off, but his political career certainly did.  He had a 12 year run as Governor of Arkansas, and then another 8 years as President of the United States.  William Jefferson Clinton grew up in Hot Springs and told Tony Bennett that though he was too young to enter the nightclub that night, he was there, outside at the window, listening in. 

On becoming a writer ...

The path to this Blog starts with a doctor from Lankenau Hospital sticking a tube into my artery at my right wrist, and fishing two expandable stents into my heart to open up the 100% closed proximal left anterior descending coronary artery of my heart. That artery is also known as the widow maker - and a 100% blockage usually accomplishes that task. But I've been a runner all of my life. So while this blockage was building and cutting off blood flow, when I ran, my body began doing a work-around, and found alternative ways to get blood bypassing this blockage. And so, my body had time to warn me that things needed some inspection - rather than simply announcing itself one day with a massive heart attack. Running saved my life.

And so I decided to celebrate - the extension of my life, and the new hardware, and the increased blood flow, by traveling with my lovely wife, Barb, and visiting boyood friend Jay and Dorothy in New Hampshire for a long weekend of cross country skiing. We had visited with he and his wife years before - our first time traveling together when we were first dating. On both visits, we had a wonderful time visiting with a friend I had known since kindergarten. We skied, snow-shoed, and then had apres ski wine and treats around the wood stove in their 1810 Shaker farmhouse. And on the second trip, we filled them in on the adventures we had been having together in the seven years since we had last visited.

Barb and I have been to 45 of the 50 states [now all 50 as of 2018! Ed.]. We both had been to about 25 or so when we met - and then in traveling together started to acquire more states, and then decided it was a noble goal to visit all 50 states. So we began aiming in that direction - and have gone on spring break to Mississippi, Alabama, Indiana, while others are going to Florida and Mexico. It has been a wonderful adventure.

By our rules, simply landing at an airport and laying over at a place is not enough. We only count the state if we stay overnight at least a night; or drive through a large portion of it and have a meal in it. Your mileage may vary. I don't think there is a national standard for the "Visit Each of the 50 States" club. So we go with our home made rules.

So as we sat around the wood stove and swapped stories, We told Jay and Dorothy about our travels since we had seen them. I am a big history buff, so wherever we go, I have researched the significant events of history that happened there; I always make a note of any cemeteries with the graves of the famous; and my ears perk up when we are at any location and I hear about other events of history, large and small, that happened in that particular place. And we invariably go and check them out. And now with a google search, you can always find "the rest of the story" if you wish.

When I talk about our travels, telling our travel stories, I get all worked up. People who don' like travel or history probably feel captive by these conversation, and seek to end it. Jay and Dorothy are interested, and so we told them about the little things we had discovered - the chapel where Joan of Arc prayed before her execution - now in Milwaukee; a witness telling of Franklin Roosevelt clanking down the aisle of his church, his legs crippled by polio; the last bank robbed by the James Gang, the second story balcony on President Garfield's grave where you can view the lake; the place where Major John Andre was hung for conspiring with Benedict Arnold to betray West Point - now the center point of a housing development; the club where Tony Bennett sang "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" for the very first time - while a young Bill Clinton listened outside; the table in a B&B where David Greenglass wrote down atomic weapons secrets and passed them along to the Rosenbergs. And on and on.

Jay listened with interest, and finally said "You should write these things down. Would you want to write an article for Southwest Airlines in-flight magazine?"

I have been journaling since junior high. Writing comes naturally and easy to me. I have considered myself a "writer" forever - with lots of potential locked inside. But other than a valiant attempt at songwriting during a blissful period of unemployment, I have never really tried to write for publication. I have done local writing for local causes - my historical society, my community newsletter. And suddenly Jay was asking me if I was ready for the big leagues - writing for a magazine with national exposure. I told him that I'd love to try.

I went home and over the next several months I jotted down short versions of each of these stories, what Jay called "slivers of history". I sent them off to him, to see what he wanted to use. He suggested a compilation - using several of them with artwork to illustrate the stories. I was both enthusiastic and disappointed. Enthusiastic that I was forced to write and might some day see my work published in a national magazine with a large audience. And disappointed in the approach - I had spun the idea in my head into a grander scheme, where each month Southwest would send me to a new destination where I would work on digging out the local slivers of history. How cool would that be? Turns out, I'll never know.

But the project went on, and the article was polished into final form in the February 2013 edition of Spirit magazine (see that blog entry). There is some of me in the article, but mostly Jay. He has been doing this for a long time and knows what he wants, and so his fingerprints are all over over the final piece. But my name is on it as well, and he wrote a thoughtful note in that issue, explaining how it came about. I received a nice check in the mail - the first (and so far only) time I had been paid for my writing. But the most important consequence of writing that first published piece was that it turned me from a "wannabe" into a writer. I had written, and re-written, and experienced the slings and arrows of being edited, and then had been published. And paid! Friends from around the country let me know that they had read and enjoyed the article. That gave me confidence to write again, and I took on a monthly local history article for a neighborhood magazine, and another one for my community, and then the newsletter editor's job for my historical society.

Today, with hundreds of articles under my byline, I can say without too much self-consciousness that I am a "writer". As with my piano playing, I say that I've had a lousy teacher - as in both writing and piano I am self taught. But the writing brings me joy, if not treasure. I disappear for hours at a time into my research. I am always anxious to publish, and so I don't spend as much time as I should with re-writing and editing and polishing. When I post up longer notes on Facebook, I find myself doing my best re-writing then - and so I change the article that I have already published as I think of ways to improve each one. I see the value in it, but writing for deadlines does not give you that same luxury - once you see it in print, it is too late to improve it.

I am still going to an office every day and "working" at the thing that sends money my way. But I am looking forward to retirement, and continuing to use my research and writing skills - to share with others, but mainly for my own benefit. When I complete an article, I read and re-read it, with the joy of being the creator. It is not "War and Peace". I don't aspire to the heights of the writing gods. I don't have that talent level, but instead a modest gift. And, as in this mornings efforts, I am too often in a hurry to get on with the next task in life, and so need to close.

I actually wrote the third blog entry, on Christ Church, this morning. It was a Facebook effort, but then I remembered that I had started this blog with good intentions years ago, as another outlet for my writing efforts. So I came here, and found this entry - half written. I am not sure where I was going with it then, but as with the Christ Church steeple, I found that it needed work and so have now renovated the posting and am sending it off into the world. Maybe someday, some other "wannabe" will find it and be inspired to take on an actual writing task, and see it published in some way, and be encouraged and emboldened to take on another one. My interaction with my old friend Jay set my particular stack of dominoes in motion, and I am grateful for that. May each of you who feel that urge to write find your own mentor, your first opportunity, and follow the path where it leads you. And along the way, find out that you are a "writer". Welcome to the Club!

Family Visit at Philadelphia's Christ Church

What was the tallest building in the United States from 1754 to 1810? Hint: its congregation included 15 signers of the Declaration of Independence (including George Washington, seen in the print to the left arriving at the church one Sunday). Another congregant designed the first American flag. Its minister was the chaplain for the Continental Congress. It’s adjacent churchyard and nearby burial ground are the final resting place for seven of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence, the largest number at one site.

The answer is Christ Church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I was reminded of that by a nice feature on the Church in the Winter edition of “Preservation”, the magazine of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The Church is still an active church – as active as one can be in the times of Coronavirus. It is currently restoring the majestic steeple that made it the tallest building in the colonies for more than 50 years, until those hyper-competitive Bostonians put a taller steeple (by 17 feet) on their Park Street Church in 1810.

According to the article, Christ Church’s current baptismal font was the same one where Pennsylvania’s founder, William Penn, was baptized in London. The font, a “massive walnut octagonal baptismal font”, dates back to medieval times, and in the weasel words used by writers on history when they have no proof of the answer, “is thought by some to be the oldest object in America continually used for the same purpose”. “Thought by some”!

William Penn was a Quaker – and they don’t baptize - so why was he baptized in an Anglican church? Penn was born into English society: his father was an admiral in the Royal Navy, and a friend of King Charles II. William Jr. was baptized in All Hallows-by-the-Tower, one of the oldest churches in London, in 1644. Penn was later attracted to the Quaker movement as a young man, and like many of them he was jailed for his beliefs, and suffered a falling out with his father for this reason. After his father’s death, Penn had a vision of a better world, one of religious tolerance for all. King Charles owed Penn’s father a large sum of money, and Penn as the heir suggested that rather than paying the debt in cash, the King give him land in the new world. The King agreed, provided that the new land was named after Penn’s father, and so “Penn’s Sylvania” came into being, named not for William, but for his father.

Meanwhile, All Hollows Church in London had commissioned a new baptismal font, and an artist named Grinling Gibbons had carved “what is regarded as” (weasel weasel) one of the finest pieces of carving in London [definitely worth a click-through. Ed.]. When it was installed in 1682, their “old” font became surplus. What to do with it? Why not ship it off to Penn’s Sylvania, as a reminder to William Penn of his roots? The Preservation article notes that this was done perhaps as a gibe at Penn – taunting him with his Anglican roots.

I spent an hour or so looking for more specifics here but could not find more than the basic line that was repeated throughout the last 100 years or so – that the font was sent to Philadelphia in 1697. Penn was alive then, but was not living in Pennsylvania. The current Christ Church was not built until 50 years later. However, there was an earlier incarnation – apparently even some Church of England adherents had left England for the New World, and when they arrived in Philadelphia, they built a small wooden Anglican church on the site of the current location in 1696. So that timing works for the arrival of the font the next year. As the congregation grew, they erected a new brick church between 1727 and 1744, topped by the current steeple in 1754.

My 5th great grandfather, Theodorus Hall, was married in Christ Church on April 29, 1729. His family lived in Tacony, and were some of the founders of Trinity Church Oxford, about ten miles away from Christ Church. Why was he not married in his home church? I am guessing that Christ Church was the home church of his bride, Gartrey Goodwin. Her line is one of those dead ends that you sometimes come to with genealogy research, so I know little about her, other than that she was the mother of ten children in her life and lived to age 95. To live to that age, and to raise that large a brood in those times, meant you were one tough cookie.

Theodorus’ older sister, Susannah, was also married at Christ Church on May 2, 1733, to Joseph Harvey Jr. Sadly, Joseph died in 1736, leaving Susannah a widow with a young daughter. She later remarried to John Harvey Rush, also a widower with a young daughter. Their union produced six children, and a middle child, Benjamin, went on to study medicine and in the course of human events also signed the Declaration of Independence. He is one of the more accomplished founding fathers, Dr. Benjamin Rush.

Susannah was another tough cookie in the family tree. Her second husband died in 1751 leaving her, at age 34, with seven children to raise, ranging from an infant to her 16 year old daughter by her first marriage. What to do? “Under the sign of the Blazing Star, Mrs. Rush opened a shop above Second Street, opposite the immense colonnaded market shed that stretched the length of two city squares down the center of High Street [now Market Street. Ed.]. Here she sold groceries and liquor – “it was somewhat like a country store” according to one of her grandsons.” Son Benjamin noted “Her industry and uncommon talents and address in doing business commanded success so that she was enabled not only to educate her children agreeably to her wishes, but to save money.”

Susannah died at Benjamin’s home, at age 78, on July 2, 1795. He wrote of her, “Her company was at all times delightful … and as a mother she had no superior in kindness, generosity and attention to the morals and religious principles of her children.” He called her “an uncommon woman”. She was buried in the cemetery of Christ Church. Her son, Dr. Rush, joined her there in 1813. Their gravestone is still there, and was still legible a few years ago when I last visited. Since then, a storm had brought down a large branch from an old tree overhead, doing some damage to the stone. I sent off some money to contribute to needed repairs. This morning’s topic is my reminder that I need to go back and see how it fared.

My pile of reading material includes about 20 magazines. I pulled out the issue of Preservation last night to make a dent in the pile. And that led me on my odyssey this morning to find out more about the Church, and recall my family connections there. Now, three hours later, I have not read any of the other magazines. But I have had a wonderful visit this morning with Grandpa Theodorus, Grandma Gartrey, Aunt Susannah, and cousin Benjamin. I’ve learned some new things along the way. And with Facebook as an outlet, I have been able to share it with you, the folks who have read this far into this note. Thank you for staying with me on my ramble. But now is the time, as they say at the end of the service at Christ Church, to “go in peace”.

PS: If you care to join Christ Church for online worship tomorrow, or perhaps be part of the effort to restore this significant part of local and American history with your donation, go here: https://www.christchurchphila.org/steeple/.