Records From My Father, Part 5: "Remember How Great...?"

Do you remember the old Lucky cigarette ads? Remember how great cigarettes used to taste? Luckies still do. I can't find the old jingle, but I'd sing it for you if I you were here. Lucky Strike was my father's cigarette brand, back in the days when the greatest music stars recorded for Columbia, which put out a collection of greatest recordings purportedly "specially selected by Lucky Strike Cigarettes." (Here, you can download it for $7.)


Look at that yellowed Scotch tape. This record was played and played, and I remember hearing it, back in the 1960s. What a collection! Unfortunately, this record, my 5th choice for this Records From My Father series, has a chunk taken out of it, and so I can't listen to Count Basie's "One O'Clock Jump" or Dinah Shore singing "Buttons and Bows."



I'll have to start with "Sentimental Journey," with Doris Day and Les Brown's Band of Renown. This was the song my parents always identified as "our song," and I shrugged that off and let them pass on without ever telling me exactly why. Wikipedia says:

Les Brown and His Band of Renown, with Doris Day as vocalist, had a hit record with the song, Day's first #1 hit, in 1945. The song's release coincided with the end of WWII in Europe and became the unofficial homecoming theme for many veterans. 

My God. My father was drafted in 1945, and he met my mother in the Army — she was one of the first WACs — and they married 2 weeks later. Anyone reading that can construct a better idea of why that was their song than I had, growing up hearing that and hearing those seemingly silly old fools calling it their song.

A couple songs later is something I remember loving as a child. "My Heart Belongs to Daddy," sung by Mary Martin — whom I (and maybe you) mostly think of as Peter Pan. I didn't understand the idea of a sugar daddy. The adults understood the song on that level. To me, a girl was devoted to her father... to the point of calling him "da da da da da da da da daddy."

There's much more on this immensely pleasurable album, including Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellignton, and Xavier Cugat, and Cab Calloway, "that Hi-De-Ho man," as the liner notes remind us...



You can see the handwritten initials in the top left corner: RAA. My father's name was Richard Adair Althouse. "Adair" is also my middle name.

So I want to warn you laddie
Though I know that you're perfectly swell
That my heart belongs to Daddy
Cause my Daddy, he treats it so well

This is a broken record, but my heart is not broken. I only wish I'd figured out, before it was to late, that there were things I could have talked to my father about, but I am talking about these things now.

Gonna take a sentimental journey
Gonna set my heart at ease
Gonna make a sentimental journey
To renew old memories.

(Comments invited... and moderated.)