THE KING of 52ND STREET Copyright
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THE KING OF 52ND STREET Copyright - Jack Pearce Daniels 2020 (Working Titles) 1 That Old Black Magic 2 The Billy Daniels Story 3 Soul Pursuit 4 Mr Black Magic 5 The King of 52nd Street By Jack Pearce Daniels 07887 386601 [email protected] Copy Retained at/Representation – William Boone Daniels II Attorney at Law 3819 Montecito Avenue Santa Rosa California 95404 Title and all pages Copyright – Anthony Jack Pearce, Jack Pearce Daniels, JPDC Ltd.25OCT20 The King of 52nd Street by Jack Pearce Daniels For Jeremy and Jonas Contents 1 You should know, after all this time 2 Gene Norman Presents 3 Devotion 4 Touchdown 5 You go to my head 6 It was before TV had taken over 7 Love is a many splendored thing 8 The 'Search For' Button 9 I just wanted to sing 10 Val Parnell Presents 11 The Good Shepherd 12 It must have been fate 13 I have thought of you often 14 The Voyage 15 The City of Light 16 Boxed Memories 17 You've got a nice voice kid 18 Performance Beyond Promise 19 Blood Brothers 20 He knew I wouldn't let him down Once your consciousness is tapped in a certain way, you see things differently. Everything reminds you, everything becomes significant, absolutely everything. Eddy L. Harris, 'South of Haunted Dreams' 1 You should know, after all this time "Your father came from there, Jack" whispered my mother, holding her map of Florida to shield us from my Dad and my wife Jane. We were visiting my parents one winter evening at their cottage in the shadow of Pendle Hill, between Colne and Nelson, Lancashire, in northern England. It was the eve of our first trip to America, a long awaited two-week holiday in the Florida Keys and I stared at the logs burning in the grate and silently absorbed the shock of the information that she had decided to share. "Where was he from?" I asked having waited, what was in fact 40 years, Your father was born in Florida.... here......." “JACKSONVILLE” a seaport on the Atlantic coast of northern Florida, 'Is that why as a child she sometimes called me Jackson?' the name Jacksonville was now positively alive with meaning. I was trembling, my mind filling with questions. "And then he went to Columbia University in New York” "Well I don't know anything about him. We are flying to Miami tomorrow morning and we are not going anywhere near Jacksonville" "That's where he was born, he made it in New York and then later for the rest of his life he lived in Hollywood." Jane and my Dad appeared with tea and sandwiches and my mother immediately changed the subject by asking what time our flight was due to land in Miami and in a daze I explained our itinerary. As Jane and I drove home “over the tops” in a hailstorm we talked about my secret conversation with my mother and I heard myself say "I'll have to find out about this biological father of mine, this holiday in America now feels like it’s a pilgrimage” My life had changed in a sentence, from the moment she had pointed to Jacksonville my father dominated my thoughts. Who was he? What did he do? What happened? What was he like? Was he a good guy? I was completely bewildered and from my earliest memory, a picture appeared an apparition from my distant past was now a shocking reality. My first flight to America became an investigation of my memory. My mother’s revelation sparked powerful recollections of my childhood, a flood of long forgotten events, a recovered memory that began to make sense. I was using my bed as a trampoline, doing handstands on the ceiling and pestering my mother as she tried to make the beds one sunny morning. "Is that my Dad, Mummy? Is that a picture of my DAD? " I yelled and I can see her now, head in hands over a framed photograph I had unearthed from the linen drawer and when I saw that she was crying, I stopped shouting. The picture was a card 'still' that years ago illuminated the foyer of a theatre or cinema. A moody black and white glossy 10 x 8 print, a head and shoulders portrait of a man in a suit with a bright spot-light shining in his face. It was an unusual image to my enquiring mind and ghost-like and I'm shocked to realise that I can recall my mother's reaction with a pang of anguish. A profound moment from my life that I all but forgotten, repressed perhaps until now. I remember the photograph disappeared, I know that for sure because I searched the house for it several times and the only possible explanation was that she had decided to throw him away. And looking back to that moment, so did I and the matter was closed that morning, until her revelation, 40 years later. I was born in Brighton, Sussex, England in 1954 and I was brought up in Barnoldswick around 200 miles north on the Yorkshire, Lancashire border. I was around the age of 6 when I recall sitting with my Mum and my Dad, they had just recently married, in an echo filled wood-panelled room in Skipton "This is a court” I can recall the serious expression on my mother's face I’d not seen before “We have come here to see a Judge to change your name to Pearce and to get you a new birth certificate" in my enlightened memory, that was the moment I found buried in the back of my mind. Examination of memory reeled me back to when we acquired our first television 'set' to see our local football heroes Burnley, lose to Tottenham Hotspur 3-1 in the 1962 F.A. Cup Final at Wembley. I was a ‘Supercar’ watching 8 year-old under a ceiling of dark blue wallpaper covered with a thousand gold stars. It had a bright circular frosted-glass light fitting hanging from the centre of the ceiling like a flying saucer. In those days after our tea-time, before the TV arrived the radio was always on and later in the evening before our television set had taken over, LP records boomed constantly from the Garrard Hi-Fi Radiogram. A polished teak cabinet that lived below a picture of a flamenco dancer in a blazing red dress. During meals my parents “variety days” were talked about a great deal when I was a boy. My mother, Audrey Cockcroft from Oldham a contemporary of Petula Clark a singer in her childhood too, needed a stage name, became Rae Croft and left home to work the variety circuit and had performed in cabaret in London’s West End. In the summer she sang pool-side and swam ‘Esther Williams’ style in the Aqua Shows that toured the British seaside resorts in the late 1940's and early 1950's. The boom time of the British family holiday beside the sea-side, beside the sea, as the old song goes. My mother once told me and again it was a serious moment “you were born in Brighton, just because we used to live there, if anybody asks you why”. My mother also met Freddie, my Dad, during their Aqua Show days. The Aqua Shows were a seaside Variety Show that took place beside but mostly in, the largest swimming-pool in the town which was usually close to the beach or to the pier. They were often municipal Victorian structures, with cast-iron conservatory entrances set in massive stone walls and some by a complicated arrangement of filters and sluice-cocks in huge pump-houses, were swimming pools that were filled with sea-water. The sea-front pool in many resorts were in the modernist style and contemporary with the town's 1930’s Odeon or Regal cinema, sweeping curves of red-brickwork with portholes of wired glass in cliff-like walls of black granite. The swimming-pools in the large resorts like Morecambe and Scarborough were swimming stadiums with banked teak-plank seating that could accommodate hundreds of spectators. All resorts also had indoor swimming-pools, 'the baths' that had spectator-seating at high-level with a painted match- board roof with ornate biscuit-tiled walls. Many pools, indoor or seafront, boasted Olympic Standard diving facilities with spring-boards and high-boards at all competition heights. The pools and the entire pier and seafront area were immaculately maintained by the local corporation ‘Parks & Gardens Department’ with terraced flower gardens that swept the holiday-makers from the beach to the shops and the pier or to the sea-side arena. The Aqua Show took place in the evening and it was like going to a variety theatre by-the-sea. The Aqua Show my mother toured Britain with, always by train back in the days before motorways and jet-travel, was Roy Fransen’s Aqua Revue. A 'Variety' extravaganza that opened with a novelty- act, Bob Braben, a Canadian log-rolling 'World' Champion, who ran an old Post Office Telegraph Pole, up and down the spot-lit pool to furious drum-rolls. He travelled in an all-original 1929 Cadillac, jet-black with a drop-down cream canvas hood with running boards and chromed spoked wheels with white-wall tyres. It was an 8-seater and plenty long enough to carry the Aqua Belles and his livelihood, a spruce telegraph pole, roped on the hood.