The LuLac Edition #3088, December 12th, 2015

HOLY COW!!! 
SAY IT AIN’T SO HILLSIDE FARMS!!!

(Image: card art)

So this morning Mrs. LuLac read a story from the Citizen’s Voice regarding that wonderful resource we have in this area called Hillside Farms. The Farms invite kids to check out the cows while they are being milked. Well they did.
It turns out that there was legal action because a kid got a bloody nose when he reached over a fence and tried to take a selfie with a cow. The cow was camera shy, bumped the kid and the child went down. He got a bloody nose!  Not maimed, not crippled, not dead.
The cow did not ask to be in the selfie. The cow was minding its own business and doing what cows do, giving milk. The cow I’m sure didn’t give a shit about getting a selfie with a kid that decided to break the rules. Cows are 600 pound animals that have very few things on their agenda. One of them is not giving a selfie to a kid.
Now Hillside has said they will no longer allow this aspect of their great tours at the facility in Dallas. Why? Because some brat broke the rules and his overactive and indulgent care givers went to a lawyer. Although I’m not with Trump on many things, I can see why people want him to run the country.
Thousands will be deprived of doing this tour because the little fella got a bloody nose! Poor baby.
And let’s just emphasize the word “baby” here.

TIM PRIBULA GONE @ 20

 My uncle Tim (tan overcoat, on the left, 5th person in) at a Ted Kennedy rally in 1980. (Photo: LuLac archives).

Twenty years ago today my Uncle Tim Pribula passed away. Even two decades after his passing, many people who ask my mom’s maiden name always bring up her brothers, Timmy, Joe and Lenny. My Uncle was a big influence on me in terms of politics. I remember fondly his first election in 1967 as a School Director in the newly formed Wyoming Area School District. Through the years I’d attend political events with him throughout the County and I saw at ground level how great but also how brutal local politics can be.
He had the knack of getting to meet famous people. Even the Champ Ali himself at Deer Lake. The legend goes that Ali was out training and somehow my Uncle got in his cabin and just hung out. When Ali and his entourage came in, my Uncle supposedly said “Hiya Champ”. He made it out of there alive so he and “The Champ” must have hit it off.
When Mickey Mantle came to town, my Uncle sat with him and they both compared notes about Dallas watering holes. My uncle was at a School Conference there and he and the Mick had a good old chat. My Uncle had a smoke and a coffee in his cup, you can imagine what Mantle had in his pre sobriety days in his paper cup.
One of the thrills of my life was when he promised me we’d meet Hubert Humphrey in 1972. Like a half back going for a touchdown, he told me to follow him as we made our way through the crowd to the dais. When we got there, he arranged a photo for me and Mr. Humphrey. Then I took a photo of my uncle and the candidate. My first time the camera jammed and Mr. Humphrey began to tell me how to work the lever. The second photo took and as we left my uncle said, “You got a lesson in photography from the Vice President”.
He was always there for family events as well as political ones too. The second picture is one of my favorites, at the Teddy Kennedy rally in 1980 on Public Square in Wilkes Barre. He was mistaken for a Secret Service guy and a national news reporter. But people who knew him in his home town of Exeter and under the dome at the Courthouse knew him as “Timmy”.
Gone 20 years but still missed.

SINATRA @ 100

(Photo: biography.com).

Francis Albert Sinatra was born 100 years ago on this day in an upstairs tenement at 415 Monroe Street in Hoboken, New Jersey. He was the only child of Italian immigrants Natalina "Dolly" Garaventa, the daughter of a lithographer from Genoa, and Antonino Martino "Marty" Sinatra, the son of grape growers from Lercara Friddi, near Palermo. The couple had eloped on Valentine's Day, 1913 and married in a civil ceremony in Jersey City, New Jersey. Sinatra weighed 13.5 pounds (6.1 kg) at birth and had to be delivered with the aid of forceps, which caused severe scarring to his left cheek, neck, and ear, and perforated his ear drum, damage that remained for life. Due to his injuries at birth, his baptism at St. Francis Church in Hoboken was delayed until April 2, 1916. A childhood operation on his mastoid bone left major scarring on his neck, and during adolescence he suffered from cystic acne that scarred his face and neck. Sinatra was raised Roman Catholic.
During the Great Depression, Dolly provided money to her son for outings with friends and to buy expensive clothes, resulting in neighbors describing him as the "best-dressed kid in the neighborhood”. 

 (Photo: biography.com) 

Excessively thin and small as a child and young man, Sinatra's skinny frame later became a staple of jokes during stage shows. He "idolized" Bing Crosby. Sinatra's maternal uncle, Domenico, gave him a ukulele for his 15th birthday, and he began performing at family gatherings. Sinatra attended David E. Rue Jr. High School from 1928, and A. J. Demarest High School in 1931, where he arranged bands for school dances. He left without graduating, having attended only 47 days before being expelled for "general rowdiness.
Fast forwarding to the golden music years of Sinatra. In 1962, Sinatra released Sinatra and Strings, a set of standard ballads which became one of the most critically acclaimed works of Sinatra's entire Reprise period. Frank Sinatra, Jr., who was present during the recording, noted the "huge orchestra", which Nancy Sinatra stated "opened a whole new era" in pop music, with orchestras getting bigger, embracing a "lush string sound". Sinatra and Count Basie collaborated for the album Sinatra-Basie the same year, a popular and successful release which prompted them to rejoin two years later for the follow-up It Might as Well Be Swing, arranged by Quincy Jones.
Sinatra's phenomenal success in 1965, coinciding with his 50th birthday, prompted Billboard to proclaim that he may have reached the "peak of his eminence" In June 1965, Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Dean Martin played live in St. Louis to benefit Dismas House, a prisoner rehabilitation and training center with nationwide programs that in particular helped serve African Americans. The Rat Pack concert was broadcast live via satellite to numerous movie theaters across America. The album September of My Years was released September 1965, and went on to win the Grammy Award for best album of the year. Granata considers the album to have been one of the finest of his Reprise years, "a reflective throwback to the concept records of the 1950s, and more than any of those collections, distills everything that Frank Sinatra had ever learned or experienced as a vocalist”. One of the album's singles, "It Was a Very Good Year", won the Grammy Award for Best Vocal Performance, Male. A career anthology, A Man and His Music, followed in November, winning Album of the Year at the Grammys the following year.
In 1966 Sinatra released That's Life, with both the single of "That's Life" and album becoming Top Ten hits in the US on Billboard's pop charts.

Strangers in the Night went on to top the Billboard and UK pop singles charts, winning the award for Record of the Year at the Grammys.

He also did a record with his daughter Nancy in 1967.

He married Mia Farrow on July 19, 1966, a short marriage which ended with divorce in Mexico in August 1968. He was 50, she was 21. Sinatra’s age gap was an incredible 29 years. (At LuLac, we keep records on things like this!!)  They remained close friends for life, and in a 2013 interview Farrow admitted that Sinatra may be the father of her son, Ronan Farrow (born 1986).

Ronan Farrow. This kid doesn't look like Woody Allen!!!!! (Photo: Hollywood Reporter).  

Paul Anka wrote this iconic song for Frank.
Sinatra was lastly married to Barbara Marx from 1976 until his death. The couple married at Sunnylands, in Rancho Mirage, California, the estate of media magnate Walter Annenberg, on July 11, 1976.
Sinatra was close friends with Jilly Rizzo, songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen, golfer Ken Venturi, comedian Pat Henry and baseball manager Leo Durocher.
When I worked at Rock 107, I also did sales for WEJL/WBAX AM which at that time was playing Popular American Standards. I had convinced the Marketing Director at the Wyoming Valley Mall to do a remote broadcast a week before Sinatra’s birthday. WEJL Morning Host and Program Director Michael Neff had this huge birthday card and had people at the Mall sign it which we later mailed to Sinatra. Our good friend from Rock 107, Judy Haudenshield got us tuxedos from Sarno’s and we had Sinatra music playing for a time. The funny thing about this is that when Neff showed up, he strode toward me, extended his hand and simply said, “Hi, I’m Jilly!!!”
In his spare time, Sinatra enjoyed listening to classical music, and would attend concerts when he could. He swam daily in the Pacific Ocean, finding it to be therapeutic and giving him much-needed solitude. He would often play golf with Venturi at the course in Palm Springs, where he lived, and liked painting, reading, and building model railways. Though Sinatra was critical of the church on numerous occasions, and had an Albert Einstein-like view of God in his earlier life, he turned to the Roman Catholic Church for healing after his mother died in a plane crash in 1977. He died as a practicing Catholic and had a Catholic burial.
Today observances are going on all across the country remembering the Man and his music. When I was in Grade School, I'd frequently visit the Dellarte Brothers from Wyoming would get together every summer a few times a year. They had a friend named Dave Emershaw who got into a little debate with Dellarte’s dad, Joe, about whether Sinatra or the Beatles would be remembered into the next century. Mr. Dellarte was adamant that Sinatra would still be lauded and the young Mr. Emershaw touted his case for the Beatles. Turns out both were correct. Proving that there is good music, great music and timeless music.
Sinatra’s, as well as The Beatles are timeless. That's why we celebrate his artistry today!

(wikipedia, LuLac).