Bread

I love all kinds of bread. I prefer it to potato, rice, or even pasta. I'd have bread at every meal, and so when the Easton area is full of good bread, I have to watch my carbs!

It's been a long time since I tasted the incredibly dull taste of Wonder Bread, but I ate a lot of peanut butter and fluff sandwiches or peanut butter and banana sandwiches when I was a kid. Today, the supermarkets are filled with much more healthy choices like the offerings of the "When Pigs Fly" bakery in Maine that bakes several hearty whole grain breads like Anadama Bread or Pumpernickel. The name Anadama alleged originated in New England when a husband came home to find that his wife was off gallivanting and hadn't made the bread-"Anna Damn her" bread was what the husband threw together.

Even regular bakers like Arnold put out solid healthy non-white choices. Sadly my "favorite" bread from Arnold are those flats that you can slap around a turkey burger and pretend you are eating a roll. At least they come in whole wheat and multigrain varieties.

Real bread lately has come from the Farmer's Market. This summer O'Brien's Bakery from Quincy, the long time Easton Farmer's Market champ had to duke it out with Bridgewater Village Bakery aka The Sourdough Lady. Despite O'Briens offering every bread variety under the sun, the artisanal sourdough was the hands down winner with the customers. At the indoor Winter Market at Simpson Springs there are often three bakers on site. The great breads and confections from Bridgewater come in their infinite variety, but Linda S. from Pond Street has found her niche with scones, cookies, and fudge. A new baker from Norton has also come in with non-sourdough artisan breads; the one loaf of rosemary cheese bread I tried was great!

The problem with artisanal breads is they often come in shapes that are not sandwich optimal. Easton has a solution for that at Andrews Cafe. One of my three New Year's resolutions was to eat at Andrews Cafe at least once a week.  I love their sandwiches-simple, healthy, excellent, with a great price and a cookie for dessert (if you can stay away from their amazing blondies). The bread is a highlight not a sidelight in Andrew's sandwiches. Anyway after my sandwich I bought a loaf of rye bread to take home. Their bread makes great toast whether its multigrain, Jewish rye, pumpernickel, or marble rye (my favorite).

I'm not going to forget two out of town places although I don't go to either one for bread. One is Back Bay Bay Bagel. Now I taught in Randolph when the population was heavily Jewish so I know my bagels as well as knishes, tsimmes and other fabulous food. My Randolph friends and I agree that Back Bay makes the best bagels in the area surpassing the late and somewhat lamented Zeppy's in Randolph.

In exotic Stoughton there is the Stoughton Bakery right next to the train station. I've discovered the back way to this place that avoids the Square, and it is becoming a weekend trip tradition. Recently reviewed in the Globe, it features all sorts of baked goods with a Portuguese flair. They make a linguica roll that is really great and a little fried "cake" that has shrimp in a white sauce inside. My favorite is a guilty pleasure for a diabetic-a sweet custard in a small pastry cup. While waiting for my shimp cake the other day I was looking around the shop when I discovered a bag of seasoning. Tune in tomorrow to discover how a decades long quest to get the secret recipe for Portuguese meat on a stick finally was realized. Take that you Freitas, Pires, and Gomes families!

Radio Sidekicks 2

 Hopalong Cassidy and the Cisco Kid both began life as rough characters in turn-of-the twentieth century short stories. Cassidy was a tough, but law abiding cowboy who got his name through an injury in his first story. The Cisco Kid was actually a villain in an O. Henry story. In the 1930's actor William Boyd began to star in a series of 66 B-westerns loosely based on the Cassidy character. "Loosely based" means the original author of the stories fainted at a showing of the first film! The hero Cassidy had two sidekicks in the films: a young headstrong and romantic cowboy and a bumbling older cowboy who provided comic relief. The job of the young sidekick was to initiate the plot by getting involved with a girl or some problem which the wiser, older (so old he had white hair!) Hopalong would solve. The older sidekick was a not-to-bright bumbler who sometimes got into trouble and had to be rescued or made some funny mistake that got Hoppy into trouble. For most of the films Andy Clyde, a Scottish character actor who specialized in rural American accents, played California Carlson,  the older sidekick.

When the market for B-movies faded, Boyd got the brilliant idea of buying up the rights to the films and cutting them down for use in the new medium of TV. Appearing in 1949 Hopalong Cassidy became the first TV western and a megahit. Interestingly, unlike the Lone Ranger which aired on radio for years before making the jump to TV, the Hopalong Cassidy radio show was a spin off of the TV series. Wonder if anyone saw the handwriting on the wall with that although radio westerns lasted another decade after the 1950 debut of Hopalong.

Going from a B-movie to an hour TV show to a half hour radio show meant something had to give and what gave was the young sidekick. California Carlson became the only sidekick. That left room for some character development for Clyde's character. We learn that the nickname came when he bought a gold mine in California that turned out to be in the middle of San Francisco Bay. We learn that a series of spinsters have tried to land the commitment phobic Carlson and that occasionally these become the basis for an episode. We also discover that Carlson is a bottomless pit that needs to be filled with steak, bacon, beans, and flapjacks. As the not-to-bright sidekick Carlson gets to hear Cassidy advance the plot with explanations, an ancient radio story device. Like Tonto Carlson is occasionally sent off with messages to deliver, but unlike the noble Indian Carlson is often made to look foolish or backwoodsy. Despite his bumbling, he always has Hoppy's back in a gunfight.

If you're looking for a storyline for a new TV show, you could do worse than a variation on Hoppy and California. Imagine two retired grandfathers roaming the country in an RV. One a retired middle management type with a famous reputation and the other his company's former janitor or better yet former company trucker with a girlfriend in every truck stop. Each week they roll into another crime scene or swindle or broken family relationship that they fix in the 46 minutes of a typical network show.

As the last of the radio westerns rolled out, they became grittier and more realistic just like the great hour long westerns that ended the era on TV. Gunsmoke is probably the best example. The radio show usually began with the Marshall Dillon character telling us about the lonely life of the frontier marshall, but, while Dillon often acted alone, he had Doc, Miss Kitty, and Chester as continuing characters. Chester, of course, was the bumbling California Carlson type, but in Gunsmoke his miscues had real consequences and were seldom used for comic relief in this grim series. In one instance, a mistake by Chester lets two killers escape, permanantly, with Marshall Dillon left totally exasperated.

 Sidekicks who never made it out of the third grade don't offend if they are All-American dimwits, but when they are ethnic characters things change at least for us today. The radio versions of the Cisco Kid and his sidekick Pancho were played by American not Latino actors. While Cisco is presented as very bright, charismatic, and capable, his sidekick is the dumbest on radio. Pancho is so dumb that he nearly gets Cisco killed on many occasions. One comes to mind where Pancho and Cisco were in disguise but Pancho can't learn to call Cisco anything but Cisco. The banditos, slightly less dumb than Pancho pick up, on this and capture the pair. Add in Pancho's stories about his fat and lazy Mexican relatives, and you have a very offensive mix. Interestingly, the radio show is still widely available while television versions of the equally offensive (this time to African Americans) Amos and Andy are hard to come by. The Amos and Andy radio show was not recorded so all but one or two episodes are thankfully lost to history. Even one of the last radio westerns recorded at the height of the early Civil Rights Movement, Have Gun, Will Travel, has stereotypical Asian sidekicks in Hey Boy and Miss Wong, two employees of the hotel where the mysterious hero Paladin makes his home.

For better and worse, radio westerns with their heroes and sidekicks reflect the time they were made. Despite their flaws, the best of them-the Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy, and Gunsmoke among the ones we've discussed and Fort Laramie among the many we haven't still provide better entertainment than the repetitious  bickering of sports radio or the drug addled babbling of Feel the Rush Limbaugh.
Podcasts of many genres of old time radio are readily available at ITunes.

Sidekick 1

Now that Joe Biden has apparently pulled us back from the fiscal cliff perhaps its time to write an appreciation for the Wild West sidekick. You know the comic relief that occasionally bails out the gun toting hero. Here I have to confess my love of old time radio-those stories that filled the airwaves from the 1930s into the 1960s. My favorite genre is the Western where in the days before Brokeback Mountain every hero rode the range with a male sidekick without the hint of a bromance. Interestingly, many of the radio detectives also had sidekicks, but they were often dames. There's a limit to how dumb you can make a dame in a radio show (Gracie Allen excepted), but there is no limit to the stupidity of many western sidekicks.

Now before you send an ambulance to take me to the rest home, I want to let everyone know I'm a child of the dawn of TV, and I first met these "legends of the Old West" on TV not radio. That makes me old enough!

Long days and nights on the trail aside, the radio sidekick existed as a plot device. When Hoppy or Cisco or Marshall Dillon was planning something California, Pancho, or Chester was there to hear his ideas in our stead. The most iconic sidekick was, of course, the Lone Ranger's Tonto. Wikipedia informs us Tonto started working with the Ranger in the twelfth episode of the radio show back in 1933. Two origin stories emerged over the years. In the first the Ranger saved Tonto's life, in the Revised Standard Version (affirmed by TV) Tonto stumbled upon the wounded Ranger after the deadly ambush by Butch Cavendish that wiped out an entire squad of Texas Rangers. Just to keep the questions down it was duly noted that the Ranger had saved Tonto's life when he was a youth or a Ute, I'm not sure-you know about Tonto's difficulty with English.

Actually Tonto was supposed to be a member of the Potawatami tribe from Michigan. It just happens that the station owner where the Lone Ranger first aired was a Michigan native who claimed to have learned a little Potawatami back in the day. Rumor also has it that the show's first director's father-in-law owned a kids camp named Camp Kee Mo Sah Bee. Tonto supposedly meant "wild one" in Potawatami while Kee Mo Sah Bee meant "faithful scout."

After the end of the Ranger's run on TV, political correctness brought a microscope to these two terms. Tonto in Spanish means "dumb" while Kee Mo Sah Bee can be translated as "One who knows." When the Ranger was dubbed into Spanish Tonto became Toro ("bull"). In the TV series I don't remember the Ranger calling Tonto Kee Mo Sah Bee, but it happens in the radio show all the time. So Tonto is the "one who knows."  Finally, it's hard to believe that people running a radio station in Michigan in the 1930's would be cool enough to make jokes in Spanish when there were French Canadians nearby to make fun of.

Now General Phil Sheridan made that unfortunate statement about good dead Indians, but for most Easterners of the '30s good Indians were stoic, laconic people with great pride and a connection to nature. The radio writers couldn't show a laconic sidekick so they invented Tonto speak: "Him, no good, Kee Mo Sah Bee. Me go, now." Since throughout the radio show the character of Tonto was played by an English actor named John Todd, there is a certain irony in Tonto's speaking problems.

As a character Tonto is not the comic relief in the plot like many sidekicks. His role is to be the avatar for the Ranger in situations where that foolish mask might raise suspicions and the writers don't want to bother putting the hero into his old prospector disguise. Tonto goes to town, Tonto carries messages to the sheriff or the ranchers, or the nesters. Often Tonto's skills save the ranger or at least advance the plot. If only Todd had been allowed to speak in an English accent, Tonto would have an honored place as one of the first minority characters to be presented as a positive rather than a negative stereotype. Remember stereotypes have a long history in theater as "stock characters."

By the way, the furry friend at my feet looking for breakfast would like to point out that her favorite sidekick is Sergeant Preston's wonder dog King ("On King, On You Huskies"), and, as a bona fide wonder dog herself, she is deeply offended with King's often insightful barks and growls being dubbed by actors with terrible accents.

More about King, California, Pancho, and Chester in the next post.