Having washed out of the Air Force during the early years of World War II for flying out of formation, my father talked himself into the job of entertainment director at a GI training camp in Greensboro, North Carolina. There, he watched as young men, mostly from the inner cities, were whipped into shape in six weeks before being shipped overseas. This experience was the foundation of his ideas of fatherhood: discipline, order and obedience.
When I came under his command less than 20 years later, I was 11 years old, shy and bookish, as well as small and underweight. To address the obvious physical inadequacies and in spite of the fact that both he and my mother were small-boned and five foot seven and five foot two respectively, he implemented a regimen of exercises and practices that he had observed in Greensboro: jumping jacks, pull-ups and push-ups. To help me gain weight, he insisted on chocolate milkshakes and finishing what was on my plate. His guiding principle was, “With eating comes the appetite.” This felt like an order which I had no choice but to obey.
The Allman Brothers Band formed during a volatile era of Vietnam War protests and the Civil Rights Movement, and the release of a live double album, “At Fillmore East,” which included the song “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” propelled them to fame in 1971. Before lead guitarist Duane Allman died at age 24 in a motorcycle crash, and was interred here later that same year, Good Times Magazine journalist Ellen Mandel interviewed him.
“How are you helping the revolution?” she asked.
Skydog’s reply would become Southern rock legend.
“Every time I’m in Georgia I eat a peach for peace.”
But when sound was integrated into film, the mighty Wurlitzers fell out of use. Decades later, when silent movie theaters were demolished, many of the organs needed to find new homes, and restaurant owners were ready to snatch them up. What followed was a new entertainment hub within pizza parlors, like Ye Olde Pizza Joynt, and other businesses that installed antique organs in the middle of their dining space to charm their customers.
Resolving the great cosmological debate of the mid-20th century was not on their agenda. Yet in 1964, astrophysicists Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. “Bob” Wilson unexpectedly discovered a radio hiss that turned out to be relic radiation from the early universe. Much to their surprise, their finding, after being interpreted and published the following year, helped settle a long-standing argument about time and space. The Big Bang theory postulated the universe had been created with an initial burst of matter and energy, whereas the steady-state theory—its main rival—described no primordial eruption but rather a slow, continuous creation of material that remains ongoing. The Penzias-Wilson discovery of background radiation tipped the scale toward the Big Bang, away from the steady-state.
Given the success of Mexican Gothic, which landed Silvia Moreno-Garcia in the New York Times bestsellers list and made her — finally — a household name, it'd be understandable to expect her to repeat that novel's formula; a wonderful mix of gothic horror, historical fiction, and nightmares. However, Velvet Was the Night, her latest novel, is nothing like Mexican Gothic, and that's great because it'll show her new readers what others have known for years: Moreno-Garcia's work is like a wild pendulum that swings from horror to fantasy to noir, and she does them all equally well.