Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Columnist takes time to celebrate the past

By JIM AYLWARD
Published July 25, 2006

I've been writing a magazine column for a few years now. Actually, 29 years.

The column, Things No One Ever Tells You, is based on a radio feature I used to do first on New York City radio station WRFM and then WOR.

When I moved to Florida five years ago, I finally decided to put some memorabilia on my home-office walls: photos, awards, ads for the show, newspaper columns I had written over the years, plus family artwork.

I had collected this stuff but thought it embarrassing to plaster it all around myself. But at the start of my 70s, I figured these snapshots of my previous lives were an acknowledgement of work I had done that was rewarding, words I had put together that still read pretty well, and moments worth remembering.

So, I sent a snapshot of my new office to Henry Dormann at Leaders magazine, which still published my Things columns, and he called me back to say, "Jim! You have a typewriter!"

Yes, like a lot of seniors who write - Elmore Leonard and others - I still use a typewriter. No computer. No e-mail. I don't access the Internet. How do I ever manage?

Well, somehow I do. This new Snapshots department in Seniority is proof. And this column is introductory: who I am, what I write about and what you can expect in future months.

So let me show you around my little office. On the wall there's a photo of moi presenting the great Benny Goodman with a gold record on stage at Lincoln Center; another picture shows me signing a copy of my first book, You're Dumber in the Summer, at B. Dalton on Fifth Avenue; and still another one of me with a Halston model and lipstick all over my face.

Also on the wall is an American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers certificate signed by composer and conductor Morton Gould, which proves I wrote songs - some of them actually published and recorded, no less. I mean, I am the person who wrote the famous lyrics to The Kitty Ate the Tinsel on the Christmas Tree. Don't fool with me!

And there's a framed ad for my RCA record album series, Jim Aylward's Beautiful Music, Beautiful Memories. We did 20 sets of those collections and I wrote a personal memory of each selection, 600 of them - something about the song, the times, the artists.

I found one of those albums recently in a thrift shop in Port Richey, and I bought it. Yes, I'm that customer.

I also have artwork on the wall by my typewriter. An oval frame holds a watercolor my mother did of actress Ann Harding. Beautiful.

And the large work with letters is another of my mother's creative ideas: She cut letters out of newspapers and magazines, pasted them on what was a beer sign my father brought home from the supermarket liquor store. Then she painted everything in, making sure none of the letters spelled anything until the good word "unity."

I think that fits well over a writer's work space.

I started writing when I was 11 years old. I wrote a book in longhand called How Silly Can You Get? Silly was a popular word when I was 11. I read this book out loud to my family and they laughed in all the right places. I was hooked.

In school when the teacher said, "Your homework assignment will be to write an essay," the other kids would groan. I couldn't wait to start putting words on paper.

When I had to stand up before the class and read those words, while I might have started off shaking, after the first or second laugh, I was better.

The same thing happened a few decades later when I agreed to emcee a special evening at Lincoln Center:

For a radio, hide-behind-the-mike kind of guy, I had to have a couple of brews before I walked onstage and looked at that huge audience. When I first spoke, my voice was registering high anxiety, but as I went along it got easier, and at intermission I stayed onstage and signed autographs and talked with the audience one-on-one. Mr. Hambone, himself.

Actually, though, I was always a reluctant celebrity. When people today find out what I used to do for a living, they ask me if I miss it. The answer is no.

I don't miss getting up at 3:30 a.m. to be on the air live at 5. Nobody would. But I really don't miss any of it, except maybe the times when publishers would call and say, "Would you like to do a book for us?"

The platform was important, and the assignments often just came to me without an agent. Today it's more like I used to be Jim Aylward. Well, I still am, and at 74 I start a new adventure here at Seniority.

In upcoming columns I'll be remembering the days before television, when almost every living room had its own "American Idol." In those days we all sang or played the piano or the violin. We made our own recordings. We made our own entertainment.

And I'll remember the bad old days of 1953, a full year of my life spent on the front lines in Korea on Baldy and Pork Chop hills, and how Washington then was as strange as it is today. (I was part of a government test group that really affected my life. I've never written about it before.)

So that's a bit about who I am and lives I've lived and today's world. By the way, you know that little blurb they put at the end of columns stating you can contact the writer through e-mail, and they give the address? Well, with just an old Brother Typewriter here, you can contact me the old-fashioned way. Yes, Virginia, the U.S. Postal Service is still in business.

Write to Jim Aylward in care of Seniority, St. Petersburg Times, P.O. Box 1121, St. Petersburg, FL 33731-1121.

[Last modified July 24, 2006, 20:56:01]