Remembering Lordo

This memory of Bob Naylor is over fifty years old so please forgive me if you were there and remember it differently. During our junior year at Central we all had to take a class in public speaking. I was assigned to Miss De Angelo’s class. The basic assignment was to prepare a five-minute speech to be delivered to the class.

Five minutes was a long time to talk and hold the audience’s attention and I struggled to put together something that had to do with atomic structure and how molecules were formed. I delivered my speech and received a grade of “passed but very boring.” Even I agreed with the verdict.

When it came time for Bob Naylor, aka Lordo, to give his speech he showed up in class with a portable turntable and a stack of records. His speech was “The History of Jazz” and he started off talking about the origins of Jazz in New Orleans. Whenever he felt like he needed to demonstrate something he would put the appropriate record on the record player and play a few minutes of music for us. Needless to say Bob was not having any difficulty filling five minutes. In fact he was only about half done when class adjourned. He came to the next class prepared to continue. I remember him playing some Bebop with Charlie Parker and saying, “That was so good lets play another cut. This time with Miles Davis.”

When he was finally finished Miss De Angelo asked him if there was anything special he did to make the music more enjoyable. He responded that he and his friends just went over to the basement of his house, smoked a few cigarettes and went up where the music was. This seemed like a strange response but I got a bit more insight into what he was saying when I walked past the playground where Bob and a group of friends were doing basketball lay-ups. They were chanting, “She grows pot around her tw**, marijuana” and putting the ball through the hoop on the last word.

Bob’s speech opened my eyes and ears to a kind of music I had always loved but never knew what it was called. When I was about five I remember sitting on the floor in front of our huge radio listening to “Rhapsody in Blue” and being stunned by how beautiful it was. Within a year or so of Bob’s speech I had my own portable record player and a stack of records by jazz greats like George Shearing, Erroll Garner, Dave Brubeck, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, Paul Desmond and Ornette Coleman . When I was a senior I would start my math homework at 11PM so that I could listen to a jazz station in Denver that played Ahmad Jamal’s “Poinciana” at the beginning of every show.

Lordo went to the University of Colorado (see Jerry Miller’s story of the maraschino cherry wine) and the last I heard of him he had been busted when he got caught smoking pot in a hotel janitors’ closet. I recently heard that he died in 1991. If he were alive today I’d thank him for turning me on to a kind of music I never get tired of. Thanks Lordo. It was a great speech and a fine gift.

Robert Pardun

Lordo and the Homemade Cherry Wine

911 ½ 9th Street. After 48 years I can still remember the address of the apartment my friends and I shared in Boulder during the fall semester of 1961. It was located within walking distance of CU, near the top of a hill and just past the old Columbia Cemetery, and a few blocks from Chautaqua. There were big oak trees along the street and they dropped huge piles of leaves. It was a two-bedroom in the basement of a bungalow owned by two elderly sisters who lived upstairs and sometimes brought us cake and pies. All the furniture seemed to be as old as the house, which was built in 1913. It was probably worth $10,000. Today it is assessed at $900,000. We paid rent of $25 per month each and agreed to shovel the sidewalks when it snowed, and it seemed like it snowed every week from late September to Christmas. We had a kitchen, living room, and bathroom. It was a dark little bunker but we decorated it with some of our own stuff and it suited us. Pardun (nicknamed Pardos) had brought a record player but we only had a few records, and we played Bruebeck’s Time Out and the soundtrack from West Side Story. To this day if I hear one of those songs I can sing all the lyrics. We didn’t have TV. We played many games of Hearts in that apartment, and I was reminded of it when I read Stephen King’s book, Hearts in Atlantis.

Mike “Dude” McNair and I shared a bedroom and Pardun and Perko had the other. It was communal living, with rotating duties; vacuuming, washing dishes, and cleaning the bathroom. We grocery shopped together at Safeway and divided the cost. I resented the grapefruit juice Pardun liked and he probably didn’t like it that I drank more than my share of the milk, but all of us got along pretty well. We designated Saturday as housecleaning day, and that lasted for a good two weeks. Dude did most of the cooking as he was the only one who knew how, and he was a good cook. Pardun did the snow shoveling because he liked it.

We had our own entrance in the back. Once all of us except Dude went home for the weekend, and on Saturday night he got back late and (guess why) couldn’t get his key to work, and he kicked open the door. He claimed he could hear the old ladies rolling out of bed when he did.

Dude had a night job at a restaurant downtown on Pearl Street. I don’t know how they used them, but they went through a lot of maraschino cherries at this restaurant. The cherries came in wide-mouth two-gallon jars. There was a lot of cherry juice left in the jars and Dude mentioned to the rest of us that he thought we could make wine out of it. Perko and Pardos were enthusiastic about it, but I had doubts as to whether these novices could brew up anything worth drinking. One night Dude brought home two jars of cherry juice and they put in yeast, I think, and covered the tops with cloth. After a certain length of time, I forget how long, they decided it was wine. Somehow Bob Naylor became involved and he was invited to join us in sampling it on a Saturday night. Naylor had been my friend since 7th grade, and all of us knew him.

My exposure to wine up to that time consisted of Shake Em Up, sort of a wine cooler, and Vino Fino, a dark table wine that we bought for under a buck a gallon and drank during poker games in my parents’ basement in Pueblo. Price was the only consideration when you selected Vino Fino. For a long time after I wouldn’t drink wine because I thought it would taste like Vino Fino. Of course, at that time I had just turned 20 years old and was not legally old enough to drink anything except beer.

The homemade cherry wine was hideous, sweet and cloudy, and it tasted like cough medicine, and I drank half a glass and went into the kitchen to make popcorn. That was back when you popped it in a frying pan. We had a gas stove that had previously cost me my eyelashes and a little hair but that’s another story. The other four congratulated each other on the manufacture of such a fine vintage, drank several glasses, and ate a hell of a lot of popcorn.

Lordo (Naylor’s nickname from his days in a Central gang) was living in a dorm and decided that rather than stagger back to campus he would spend the night on our couch, which was fine with us. We gave him a blanket and pillow. In the morning Lordo was gone but on the carpet by the couch he had left a puddle of puke consisting entirely of cherry wine and popcorn. A fine reward for our hospitality. Needless to say, we were quite pissed off and got into an argument about who was going to clean it up. All of us refused, and so nobody did. After about a week it had completely dried and I vacuumed it, sucking up most but not all of the popcorn which had by then partially adhered to the carpet.

A couple of weeks later Perko and I were drinking beer at The Sink. It was a weeknight and pretty quiet. I think some of you recall The Sink. That’s the only time I remember Perko drinking enough to semi-lose control. Close to midnight he said we should go to Lordo’s dorm and chastise him about his decision to barf and run.

“You don’t do that. You don’t drink your friends’ wine and eat their popcorn and then heave on the floor and take off. You make a mess, you clean it up. This wasn’t right, what he did.”

All right, I admit that quote is bogus. I don’t remember what Perko said. But he could have said something like that.

Perko’s idea sounded OK to me although I figured we had very little chance of actually seeing Lordo, first of all because I doubted whether Perko really knew which dorm Lordo lived in, and even if he did, whether we could find him. We left The Sink, walked a half block, crossed Broadway and we were on the university campus. It had snowed, of course. We entered the dorm Perko said was the right one and it was very quiet inside. There was a long hall and nobody around and we didn’t know which room Naylor had. Perko started walking down the hall and loudly calling, “Lordoooo. Lordoooo.” We got no response at first, but then a guy came out of a room and told us he was the student manager of the dorm and we needed to get the hell out of there now or he was going to call the campus police. Now the campus police at CU were not just security, they had authority to arrest, so this was no small deal if they showed up. Perko asked the student manager (they had another title, I forget it) if he knew Lordo, and the guy repeated his earlier request quite forcefully. He did not inquire as to Lordo’s unusual name. We left.

Walking back we passed a women’s dorm and there was a light in a second floor window. In those days (I love that term!) girls could stay out until midnight on the weekend, but had to be in their rooms by 10:00, I think it was, on weeknights. Every dorm and boarding house had a “house mother” who made sure they were in on time. Boys, (men) however, were free to prowl anywhere they pleased for all hours. It would have made more sense to let the girls out and lock the guys up.

Perko made a snowball and threw it at the lighted window. He missed, but he was close enough that some of the girls heard the sound, saw us down below, and opened their windows. They were in their jammies and they looked really cute. They taunted us regarding our snowball-throwing ability, and we lobbed a few more at them but then we saw a campus police car heading our way. When we started to leave the girls yelled for us to stay but we thought it best that we depart, and so we did.

Our living arrangement came apart just before Christmas when a couple of us who were actually concerned about their GPAs realized that they were having too much fun time and too little study time, and their semester grades might contain a B or two instead of all As, and we sort of self destructed. The next semester three of us lived in the same rooming house, but it wasn’t the same as before. Dude’s brothers, John and Doyle also lived in the rooming house, along with two other guys. One, a student, got on our nerves and as a bad joke we told him we were going to shoot him. Doyle worked in the university drama department and had access to props, including guns and blanks. One day the guy came home and Doyle and I met him with revolvers, then opened fire with the guns loaded with blanks. He turned and ran a few steps before he realized that he would be dead if we were shooting bullets. Doyle and I thought it was pretty funny. All of us had grown up with guns but were still careless with them.

By the time fall came again Dude was married and the other three all lived in different places. Just before graduation I got kicked out of my apartment and slept on Pardos’s couch for a few nights. All of us stayed friends and we still correspond and gather occasionally. A lot was going on all the time back then, some of it pretty crazy stuff to us, but it was nothing to what happened on campuses just a few years later.

All these years later, though, I think the four of us, and maybe some other people too, are still asking the same question.

Where is Lordo?

Jerry Miller