Yellow Pig

When a famous jazz-rock band and a Coal Region disco owner clashed over the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown.

In May 1980, one year after the meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Middletown Pennsylvania, the famous jazz-rock band Blood Sweat, and Tears released its final album, “Nuclear Blues”. Its title song, written by lead singer and anti-nuke activist David Clayton Thomas, was an angst-written ballad about the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown just over a year earlier. In that year between the meltdown and the album’s release, my dad and David Clayton-Thomas were engaged in a steel-cage grudge match over whether the band would play a concert at my dad’s discotheque “Movements” in the Eastern Pennsylvania coal town of Mt. Carmel, less than one hour from Three Mile Island. This story charts how Coal-Region ambition, celebrity activism, and an environmental crises created a David and Goliath battle at the end of the disco-age.

EPISODE 1 : “MT. CARMEL IN THE DISCO AGE” (links to Episodes 2 and 3 are at the bottom of this post)

After college my dad coached football for much of the next decade, first at Mt. Carmel High School then as an assistant at two small colleges, Susquehanna and Villanova, where we lived in the mid-70’s.  When the head coach at Nova was fired, my dad was asked to stay on, but instead decided to leave professional coaching and pursue new ventures back in Mt. Carmel, including managing a bowling alley my grandfather owned.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MFbn8EbB4k

The whole family, including my dad and mom, my two brothers, and our great-grandmother, moved back to our hometown. Me and my two brothers would spend long, fun, Saturdays at Route 61 Lanes, bowling, playing Space Invaders, and eating hamburgers at the greasy grill while my dad worked.   

Eventually though, my dad set his designs on reconfiguring the building.  “I’m going to build a nightclub,” he told me after I asked why they knocked down a large double door between the bowling alley and what used to be a large factory floor in the same building.   It was 1977, height of the disco era, and though we were 3 hours from both New York and Philly, there wasn’t a disco of much note in between.  My dad, who looked like a young version of Don Draper in his early 30’s, endeavored to fill this split-level space which ran about the size of a football field, with a big city discotheque.

Joe Greco has a great visual artistic sense, and his design of “Movements” was once featured in Billboard magazine.  To start, it had the biggest dance floor anyone had ever seen.  Originally the building had been a clothing factory, which created the framework for a large open dancing area that ran about 75 yards long and 30 yards wide. 

Lounge areas sat around the edges of the dance floor and on different levels.  “Grey velveteen couches face the floor – center stage for the disco audience,” according to a feature article in the Bloomsburg Press Enterprise. “A section of tables with white linen tablecloths overlooks the dance floor and in another section mauve modular couches face each other over coffee tables just out of dead center of the music, making conversation possible.”

What made Movements name (on a busy Saturday night there would be over 1000 patrons coming from as far as Scranton, Harrisburg, and Allentown) was the neon sunburst. Not gaudy neon, but thin, white neon.  It started with a round half-sun-shaped mirror on one side of the dance floor.  Busting out on all sides and up to the ceiling were sun rays made of white neon strips, and two large neon bands emanating from the base of the sun and running diagonally across the floor, providing almost a neon carpet from the entryway.  And the rays pulsated to the sound of music, out from the sun’s nuclear core, to the beat of Staying Alive, A Fifth of Beethoven, and Disco Inferno. 

Where another designer would have been satisfied bounding the large space with neat lines, my dad saw a burst of energy course across the dancefloor, transgressing the whole space and gave it the form of the neon sunburst.  In another life he could have been an interior designer or a visual artist.  Everything from the furniture, to the floor layout, to the pictures, to the chocolate and cream colored graphic posters and logos to promote Movements, my dad was the artist. 

After a successful first couple of years, my dad dreamed of taking the disco to the next level.   He would set off to New York to hire a big name band for a concert back in Mt. Carmel. It would need to be the biggest act the town had ever seen. 

Stay tuned for “DISCO INFERNO -Episode 2: The Disaster“

CLICK HERE FOR “EPISODE 2 OF DISCO INFERNO: THE DISASTER”

CLICK HERE FOR “EPISODE 3 OF DISCO INFERNO: THE LAST DANCE”

When a famous jazz-rock band and a Coal Region disco owner clashed over the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown

In May 1980, one year after the meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Middletown Pennsylvania, the famous jazz-rock band Blood Sweat, and Tears released its final album, “Nuclear Blues”. Its title song, written by lead singer and anti-nuke activist David Clayton Thomas, was an angst-written ballad about the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown just over a year earlier. In that year between the meltdown and the album’s release, my dad and David Clayton-Thomas were engaged in a steel-cage grudge match over whether the band would play a concert at my dad’s discotheque “Movements” in the Eastern Pennsylvania coal town of Mt. Carmel, less than one hour from Three Mile Island. This story charts how Coal-Region ambition, celebrity activism, and an environmental crises created a David and Goliath battle at the end of the disco-age.

EPISODE 2: “THE DISASTER” (links to Episodes 1 and 3 are at bottom of this post)

David Clayton-Thomas grew up in Toronto and cut his teeth in the early 1960’s playing rock, jazz, and blues in the Young Street strip.  In 1967 he joined Blood, Sweat, and Tears, which already had released one album, and supercharged their group as the lead singer.  In 1968 the band soared to international fame with their namesake album “Blood, Sweat and Tears” which sold 10 million copies, topped the Billboard album charts for 7 weeks, won five Grammy’s, and contained the hit singles “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy”, “Spinning Wheel”, and “And When I Die”. 

By the time my dad drove to New York a decade later to book a major band for Movements, Clayton-Thomas had left the band, cut several solo albums, and then rejoined the group in the mid-70’s to make a few more albums with a new set of Blood, Sweat, and Tears band members.  They were well past their hey-day but still had international name recognition and played a circuit of festivals, casino-show rooms, and clubs. 

https://youtu.be/VKuqaZ0DQtk

You couldn’t quite blame my dad for wanting to book a “sure thing” when he set out through the Coal Region along Route 61 toward the Big Apple, three hours due east.  Movements had seen local and regional bands on Saturday nights (as a kid I remember my dad admonishing a lead singer for throwing the f-bomb in front of me during an afternoon rehearsal).   But my dad was resolved to sign a well-known group in order to garner media attention, lots of out of town guests, and to catapult Movements to become the Studio 54 of Eastern Pennsylvania. 

You also couldn’t blame him for declining the booking agent’s offer to sign a then-unknown group, which had just formed in 1978, at a bargain-basement price.  Dad passed on the band Toto, who a year later would release one of their first hits, “99”, which rose to number 26 on the Billboard charts, and helped launch the band into stardom with later songs like “Africa” and “Rosanna”.

But with $10,000 in his pocket, which gave him only one shot to take Movements and the town to the bigtime, dad made the wise choice.  Few knew Toto yet, but everyone had heard of “Blood, Sweat, and Tears”.  They were a sure thing: a risk, but a calculated risk.  He signed the contract and drove back to Mt. Carmel every inch a hero.  Word spread fast, and ticket sales outstripped Movements’ capacity.  The concert had to be moved to a larger venue: the Mt. Carmel High School gym.  This event would be a Big F’n Deal for the area. 

And then disaster struck.  

On March 27^th, 1979, during a routine attempt by operators to unclog a common blockage of resin in the secondary cooling system of Three Mile Island (TMI) Nuclear Generating Station, a small amount of water was pushed into an instrument airline past a stuck-open valve, tripping the steam generator system and causing an emergency shutdown of Reactor II.  The three auxiliary coolant pumps that would normally get triggered to cool the reactor during such an incident had been shut down that week for routine maintenance, a violation of Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules, so no water was pumped in.  This led to a series of human and mechanical errors which eventually caused a partial meltdown of TMI Reactor II’s core and the eventual release of radioactive gas and iodine into the environment.  The worst nuclear accident in U.S. history, the TMI meltdown led to the voluntary evacuation of over 100,000 residents of the nearby Harrisburg PA Metro-area. 

The evacuations didn’t extend as far as Mt. Carmel, and at no time did the radiation released reach dangerous levels, according to experts.  So to my dad, the meltdown by David Clayton-Thomas was just as devastating as the TMI meltdown.  The singer informed him, in no uncertain terms, that Blood, Sweat, and Tears was not coming anywhere near f-ing TMI.   Clayton-Thomas had been an anti-war activist during the Vietnam era and was an anti-nuke activist now.  Big political battles had swirled around the construction of nuclear power plants in the 70’s like another one near Berwick also less than an hour away.   By refusing to play the concert he was taking a stand.

On one hand you could understand Clayton-Thomas’ point: There was a disaster in an industry he opposed, and why come anywhere near this small town disco to, in his mind, risk his life.  The lyrics in “Nuclear Blues”, released the next year, give you a glimpse into Clayton-Thomas’ state of mind regarding TMI:

“What you think this world is coming to

What you think the man is going to do?

I got nothing I can do about it Paranoia

Nuclear Blues”

On the other hand, who was he standing WITH? The people of Mt. Carmel and the Coal Region LIVED there, they were being told they were safe and not to evacuate, Governor Thornburg stayed in Harrisburg the whole time, and President Carter had toured TMI itself after the meltdown.  Most of Mt. Carmel, which was a working-class town, didn’t have the luxury to leave.  By the late 70’s most of the area’s major mines had shut down, and the economy had long since collapsed.  To us, it felt like we were the ones being abandoned.

• 

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This was the biggest event to happen to the town, outside of football, in a long time.  After all, if BST played in Mt. Carmel, what other bands might come in the future? What could this mean for Movements? For this part of the Coal Region?

If the experts were saying life must go on uninterrupted for the people of Mt. Carmel, so my dad said the show must go on for Blood, Sweat, and Tears.  Sure my dad’s own personal ambitions were mixed into this, but he was a businessman, and he had a signed contract from his New York trip to book a band, and he told David Clayton-Thomas that he would hold him to it.  

Stay tuned for “Episode 3 of Disco Inferno: I Will Survive”

CLICK HERE FOR “EPISODE 1 OF DISCO INFERNO: MT. CARMEL IN THE DISCO AGE”

CLICK HERE FOR “EPISODE 3 OF DISCO INFERNO: I WILL SURVIVE”

When a famous jazz-rock band and a Coal Region disco owner clashed over the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown

In May 1980, one year after the meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Middletown Pennsylvania, the famous jazz-rock band Blood Sweat, and Tears released its final album, “Nuclear Blues”. Its title song, written by lead singer and anti-nuke activist David Clayton Thomas, was an angst-written ballad about the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown just over a year earlier. In that year between the meltdown and the album’s release, my dad and David Clayton-Thomas were engaged in a steel-cage grudge match over whether the band would play a concert at my dad’s discotheque “Movements” in the Eastern Pennsylvania coal town of Mt. Carmel, less than one hour from Three Mile Island. This story charts how Coal-Region ambition, celebrity activism, and an environmental crises created a David and Goliath battle at the end of the disco-age.

EPISODE 3: “THE LAST DANCE” (links to Episodes 1 and 2 are at the bottom of this post)

Contracts are sacrosanct in our country, and my dad was right to try to hold Clayton-Thomas to his word and signature.  Contracts are crisp, clear, and enforceable. 

Artistic performances, on the other hand, are something altogether different.  Good ones require that the artist inspire, or breath life into their performance.   Sometimes a band accomplishes this, and sometimes they don’t.

“Dad what’s wrong?” I asked.

I could tell he was fuming, since my dad always got silent when angry. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARt9HV9T0w8

He sat in the second row of the retractable bleachers near the entrance to the boys locker room.  I stood next to him in the narrow passageway between the bleachers and the wall.  The Mt. Carmel High School gym held 500 people on one side, and about 250 on the other. It had plenty of room for a concert stage on one end, with requisite sound and lighting. 

This was my first concert, and I found it exciting.  The darkened lights, the thrill of loud music.  But for my dad, it was a different story.

“They’re not playing their good songs.” my dad snarled, then went silent again.  

The contract dictated the band had to play, but was silent about what songs they did play. For a small town which generally just got “top 40” or syndicated songs on the radio, this was especially tough.  A few local music junkies might have relished in the B-side hits played that night.  But for most folks, hearing the band’s famous hits would have opened the doorway to this second wave of lesser known material.

On this night, however, that door was never opened.  My dad must have felt it shone badly on him.  He could deliver a band, but not the knockout punch.  They did the worst thing a famous band could do: they failed to inspire.  And he knew it was very, very intentional. 

My dad’s only recompense was the “after-party” to be held at Movements following the show. Comfortably back at the club, he could shine on his home turf as host to the local gentry, club regulars, out of town guests, and the band.  Champagne, fine cuts of Italian meat and cheese, sandwiches, and Swedish meatballs. The Infinity Mirror shone brightly, and the liquor shelves were stocked, ready to supply highballs well into the night. 

The festivities were held on the club’s upper level near the entrance, where there was one large bar which wrapped around three sides of a small interior kitchen.  My trigonometry teacher and my uncle were among the bartenders, clad in black pants and white button down shirts.  Waifish cocktail waitresses in clingy dresses served drinks around plush red couches and chairs that ran along the long lounge on the far side of the bar.  

Directly across from the bar built into the corner of the room was my dad’s office, protected with one-way mirrors, behind which he monitored operations from his comfortable perch.

While the guests were beginning to eat and get lubricated, he sat back with feet upon his desk, putting himself into a positive mindset as he waited for the band to arrive. 

When the tour bus finally pulled up, he hopped up to greet them.  But instead of Clayton-Thomas and the band, the bus spat out one lone roadie, a young dude dressed in tight faded jeans and a ringed tee-shirt.

“Uh, the guys aren’t going to be able to come in,” he nervously told my dad at the front door of Movements. “They gotta’ hit the road.”

“Are you kidding me?” barked my dad in disbelief and anger.  Though underneath, you could tell he wasn’t surprised at all.

“Yeah, but they are asking for some food.” He pulled out a crumpled list from his front pocket and cleared his throat: “Ahem…they want three sandwich trays.  A case of champagne.  Five cases of beer.  Lots of chips.  And whatever desserts you have.  They don’t care what kind.”

My dad was aghast.  In the bus sat a group of spoiled, arrogant, and literally starving artists.  Waiting in the club behind him was Mt. Carmel, in all its shapes, sizes, personalities and stations.  He took a breath to assess his options.  It wasn’t in my dad’s nature to overreact and he had to sense what fight was winnable.  He then instructed his team to deliver all the desired grog and gruel to the bus. 

If this was the band’s attitude, he didn’t want them at the party anyway.

But my dad had a parting shot of his own to deliver.  Before releasing the food, he presented the band’s grungy messenger with a handwritten bill for $2,500, about a fourth of the band’s overall take for the night. 

The roadie disappeared into the bus for an awkwardly long time, but then reemerged with the money, and no complaint. Clayton-Thomas must have been just as weary as my dad from fighting.  The food was loaded, and the band headed off to more prosperous lands.  My dad walked back into Movements, with his head held high and the visage of a hero, and proclaimed to the gathering: “Let’s drink!”  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwuy4hHO3YQ

CLICK HERE FOR “EPISODE 1 OF DISCO INFERNO: MT. CARMEL IN THE DISCO AGE”

CLICK HERE FOR “EPISODE 2 OF DISCO INFERNO: THE DISASTER”

Yellow Pig Subscribers – It was recently announced that the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station near Harrisburg PA will be entirely shut down this year. In March 1979, TMI’s Reactor II melted down, causing the worst nuclear accident in the nation’s history. Later that year, my dad, who owned a discotheque in our hometown of Mt. Carmel PA (less than an hour from TMI), got in a Battle-Royale with the lead singer of the band “Blood Sweat and Tears”, David Clayton-Thomas, over whether the band would stick to their agreement to play at his disco “Movements”. Clayton-Thomas was an anti-nuke activist, and vowed his band would come nowhere near Mt. Carmel or TMI.

I’ve created a three-part blog series that chronicles this grudge-match between my dad and Clayton-Thomas, and will be giving a sneak preview to Yellow Pig subscribers (right now there are 22 of you!) before distributing it more widely on social media. I will be releasing it soon. I would value your input, feedback and comments, since I can make adjustments to the format before sending it out more broadly. There are three episodes, which you can either read, or listen to through an audio-recording. They are only 5-7 minutes each so you can read or listen to them all in under 20 minutes. Would love to know what you think!

½ cup hot coffee

½ cup Blackberry Manischewitz

Pour both into coffee cup, stir, and enjoy.  Thank Granny Dallago. 

My favorite holiday drink, and possibly the best drink that every lived, is what our family calls “coffee and wine”.  To be precise, the drink is ½ cup hot coffee, and ½ cup Manischewitz Blackberry Wine, first thing in the morning.   A jug of Blackberry Manischewitz, the super-sweet Jewish Kosher wine, always sat in our family’s cupboards growing up.  Our family is Italian and Catholic, and though Manischewitz has historically had a sacramental purpose for the Jewish-American community, my mom can trace our family’s tradition as far back as her grandmother, Lena Dallago, who immigrated from the poor Abruzzo region of Southern Italy. 

As a teenager, my great-grandmother came to the U.S. through Ellis Island and lived in the small, coal-mining town of Atlas, Pennsylvania.  (Granny Dallago now has a plaque in her name at Ellis Island, and was also featured in my very first, and mostly-true blogpost on Felix Screendoorface Mangialetto, the Italian “syndicate” man also from Atlas). Granny woke at 2:30am every morning to bake homemade bread by 5:30am for the coal miners who boarded in her family’s home. My mom remembers being sent to school each day with a belly full of hot buttered bread, and on especially cold mornings, coffee and wine.  I picture her hiking through snow with purpose in her Catholic school outfit, then arriving in Algebra class both energized and relaxed by the concoction, ready to get down to business. (After reading this blog post my mom pointed out that she did, in fact, get an “A” in Algebra.)

Initially, my grandmother used another Kosher wine brand, Mogen David, but at some point switched to Manischewitz, possibly as a result of the company’s successful campaign to build a market for the wine among non-Jewish customers in the 1950’s and 1960’s.

Though the recipe is simple, it is important not to stray from the ingredients.  For starters only BLACKBERRY Manischewitz will do.  At one point an uncle of mine came home with the Concord Grape variety, with embarrassing results.  It was never tried again.  You can get a bottle at most grocery or liquor stores, and sometimes at CVS, for about 5 bucks.  Other brands of red table wine should not be tried: they simply will not be sweet enough. 

Mainschewitz’s syrupy sweetness evidently goes back to its early days as a mass producer of Kosher wine for the growing Jewish community in New York in the 1940’s. Since the large batches of Concord grapes from upstate New York produced an uneven quality of wine during the fermenting process, lots of sugar was added to make it more palatable. The syrupy sweetness became its hallmark, and was applied to its other varieties as well.  Though today Manischewitz is sweetened with corn syrup for most of the year, during the four months preceding Passover season it is produced with real cane sugar to meet Kosher requirements.   So while either type will do just fine for coffee and wine, if you buy a bottle that reads “Kosher for Passover”, you are in for a special treat.

(Please comment and share any of your own family holiday drink traditions)

by Doug Greco

Based on new information just obtained by the Yellow Pig about Felix “Man-O-War” Bocchicchio, I am posting this short follow-up, “Felix, Revisited” to my last entry, “Nana’s Rumpus Room.” My Uncle Jeff, a Mt. Carmel PA physician practicing in the same office my grandfather did a few generations ago in my hometown, currently counts among his patients an old-timer in his 90’s who as a young man knew Felix Bocchicchio from the nearby town of Atlas, PA.  Due to both RICO and HIPPA laws, instead of using his family name, I will refer to this man as Mr. Nicotini.   

Evidently Bocchiccio and his friends would come to Atlas when things “got hot” in New York. Though it was a tiny town of 1,600, according to my uncle Atlas had been known for its bars. “Very pretty bars.  And dance bands.” Gene Krupa, the famous Jazz drummer who helped revolutionize the drum solo and modern drum set, evidently used to play in Atlas. 

Nicotini, who worked at one of the coal breakers in Atas, gives an alternate account of how Bocchicchio became the manager and promoter of the Heavyweight champion Jersey Joe Walcott.  In my last post I relayed the story from a “Camden People” article that Felix convinced a reluctant Walcott, a largely unknown boxer already in his 30’s, to continue boxing and take him on as his manager.  But in Nicotini’s version, it was Felix who was approached by a young African-American man in a Camden NJ butcher shop, the talented but unknown Joe Walcott, and not the other way around. 

“Hey I heard you’re a promoter,” said Walcott.  He then asked Felix if he would take him on as a fighter.  Bocchicchio said “no way”, but Walcott pushed back hard, and eventually Felix relented.  After managing him for a few years, Walcott knocked-out then-champion Ezzard Charles in 1951 to become the oldest man to win the heavyweight belt, at 37. 

Nicotini claims “whole busloads” of people from Atlas would go up to New York to see the Walcott fights. On occasion a young Nicotini and a group of his friends were talking with Felix after one of the bouts.  Felix, who was always full of spit and vinegar, love to banter.  He asked the names of everyone in the group.  “Hey, who are you?….and who are you?” and so forth.

“I’m Nicotini.”

“Nicotini?,” Bocchicchio lit up. “I know the Nicotini’s from Atlas!  I stole your grandmothers cow! That’s what got me started in this business!”  And he didn’t mean the boxing business.

Felix also looked after folks from the Coal Region who lived in New York, but also used them as a source of information.  On another occasion, a hometown kid had just moved to New York and found an apartment. Felix called him up and said “Hey grab some of your buddies and I’ll take you out for steaks.” 

While the young guys wolfed down their food, the punchy Felix pumped them for scoop:  “How’s so and so? Yeah, and how’s so and so?” And so on and so forth.

When the hometown boy said about one of the inquiries, “Oh, he died”, Felix shot back, “Thank God! That saved me a confession.  I was supposed to bump him off next week!.”  The fellas roared.