Podcasts about when charles

Episode 37b - When Charles heard that Calvin Cheng called Singaporeans crybabies, his heart swelled up with the nationalistic pride of a thousand angry Singaporeans and what was meant to be a 15 minute segment ended up twice as long.We casually scrolled through his FB page and delved shallowly into his wikipedia entry while we dissected his post, online persona and history as a Nominated Member of Parliament (NMP).Does his position have any merit? How does he stack up to other vocal people like Lim Tean and Chee Soon Juan? Why the hell was Charles so upset?The answers, all here. PRESS PLAY ALREADY DAMMIT.Note: Calvin's post is on our instagram page. Check it out for context!

Q&A on the movie The Outside Story with director Casimir Nozkowski. Moderated by Mara Webster, In Creative Company. An introverted editor living a vertical life in his 2nd-floor apartment, always on deadline and in a rut. When Charles locks himself out of his building, he's forced to go horizontal and confront the world he's been avoiding in search of a way back inside.

Anne Moss Rogers was at the pinnacle of a 20-year professional career. She opened her own digital marketing agency in 2010. The business grew quickly and by 2015 she and her partner had 9 employees and a growing roster of clients. While her professional life was going especially well, life at home had significant problems. Her son Charles – the younger of two boys – suffered from a combination of depression and drug addiction. The problems began early in high school and escalated. At considerable expense to Anne Moss and her husband Randy, they tried to help by placing him in a therapeutic boarding school followed by rehab. But on June 5, 2015 at the age of 20, Charles took his own life. In the aftermath of her son’s passing, Anne Moss sold her agency and has became a staunch activist for suicide prevention. She launched “Emotionally Naked” – a blog about the experience. She speaks frequently before both high school and adult audiences. And she has written a powerful book called “Diary of a Broken Mind.” Anne Moss Rogers is a textbook example of what psychologists call “post traumatic growth.” When Charles committed suicide in 2015, she entered an unimaginable cauldron of pain and grief. And she came out the other side stronger and focused on making a difference in the world. And her work is saving lives. We concluded our interview by asking her, "What would Charles think of what you're doing now?" Anne Moss responded, "I think he would be proud to know that I'm following my heart." On the first anniversary of Charles death, Anne Moss Rogers recorded an emotional reading of the lyrics of "Forgive Me Momma," one of many songs that were discovered in her son's backpack after his passing. It's about four minutes long and we hope you'll give it a listen by clicking the link above.

Today we celebrate a poet who loved flowers and became the beloved poet-son of a country that celebrates him still today. We'll also learn about an orchid that inspired a fabled true story about Charles Darwin. We’ll hear about some fascinating vegetable history that is celebrated every year on this day. We Grow That Garden Library™ with some incredible exotic flower photography. And then we’ll wrap things up with the garden and the Three R’s of Renovation.   Subscribe Apple | Google | Spotify | Stitcher | iHeart To listen to the show while you're at home, just ask Alexa or Google to “Play the latest episode of The Daily Gardener Podcast.” And she will. It's just that easy.   The Daily Gardener Friday Newsletter Sign up for the FREE Friday Newsletter featuring: A personal update from me Garden-related items for your calendar The Grow That Garden Library™ featured books for the week Gardener gift ideas Garden-inspired recipes Exclusive updates regarding the show Plus, each week, one lucky subscriber wins a book from the Grow That Garden Library™ bookshelf.   Gardener Greetings Send your garden pics, stories, birthday wishes, and so forth to Jennifer@theDailyGardener.org   Curated News How to Grow Chillies | Gardener’s World     Facebook Group If you'd like to check out my curated news articles and original blog posts for yourself, you're in luck. I share all of it with the Listener Community in the Free Facebook Group - The Daily Gardener Community. So, there’s no need to take notes or search for links. The next time you're on Facebook, search for Daily Gardener Community where you’d search for a friend... and request to join. I'd love to meet you in the group.   Important Events January 25, 1759 Today is the birthday of the Scottish poet and lyricist Robert Burns. Widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland and celebrated worldwide, tonight is Burns Night. Each year Burns Night commemorates Robert, the beloved poet born into a poor Scottish family of farmers. A typical Burns Night includes live music, poetry readings of Burns masterpieces, and a traditional Scottish meal of Haggis, Neeps, and Tatties. Now, gardeners have a soft spot for Robert Burns. His 1794 poem 'Red Red Rose' starts out with the familiar verse: "O my Luve's like a red, red rose..."  And gardeners have always loved Robert's poem “To a Mountain Daisy.” with the line, “Sweet floweret of the rural shade!  By love's simplicity betrayed” Of course, the way to end a fantastic Burns Night Celebration is to sing Robert’s most famous poem, which has now been set to music: Auld Lang Syne.   January 25, 1862 On this day, the English naturalist, geologist, and biologist Charles Darwin received a box of Orchids. Now after sorting through all of the flowers, one Orchid, in particular, caught Charles' attention: the Angraecum sesquipedale ("ang-GRAY-kum ses-kwah-puh-doll-lee"), commonly called Darwin's Orchid, the Christmas Orchid, the Star of Bethlehem Orchid, or the King of the Angraecums. An epiphyte (meaning a plant that grows on other plants), the Darwin Orchid, was initially discovered by the French botanist Louis-Marie Aubert du Petit-Thouars in 1798. When Charles first laid eyes on this Orchid, he suspected that a then-unknown moth with an almost 14-inch long proboscis must have co-evolved with the Orchid to pollinate it. Many people scoffed at this - a moth with a 14-inch tongue?!  Sadly, Charles didn't live long enough to see his prediction come true. It wasn’t until 21 years after his death, in 1903, that a moth was discovered with a proboscis that could perfectly reach the 13.5-inch nectary, and Charles’s prediction was proved to be correct. Once the moth was officially discovered it was named predicata for "the predicted one" Incredibly, it took nine more decades for scientists to observe the moth pollinating the orchid.  In 1992, a German entomologist named Lutz Thilo Wasserthal traveled to Madagascar, where he captured two moths. After placing the moths in a cage with the orchid, Lutz photographed them pollinating the flower - and it happened just as Charles Darwin imagined it would, after receiving the orchid on this day, over a century earlier.   Unearthed Words "Neep” is the Scots term for the rutabaga, the root vegetable known as swede in Britain. Neeps and tatties (dialect for mashed potatoes) are the traditional accompaniment to haggis, served on Burns Night (January 25). Recipes vary, but butter and a little spice such as nutmeg or powdered ginger are common additions. All, of course, must be washed down with a glass of whiskey. — Lorraine Harrison, garden writer, A Potted History of Vegetables   Grow That Garden Library Botanica Magnifica by Jonathan Singer This book came out in 2009, and the subtitle is Portraits of the World's Most Extraordinary Flowers and Plants.  In this out-of-print book, Jonathan Singer shares 250 of his stunning photographs of rare and exotic plants and flowers "in large scale and exquisite detail, in a manner evocative of Old Master paintings." “The original edition of Botanica Magnifica, consisting of five lavishly hand-bound volumes, was limited to just ten copies, the first of which was donated to the Smithsonian Institution.  Botanica Magnifica is one of the few natural history works ever to rival Audubon's magnum opus in its scope and artistry.  Singer’s remarkable images are bound together in this beautiful hardcover with slipcase, baby-elephant folio of Botanica Magnifica.  This volume is organized into five alphabetically arranged sections, each introduced by a gatefold page that displays one extraordinary plant at a luxurious size.  Each pictured plant is accompanied by a clear and accessible description of its botany, geography, folklore, history, and conservation.” This book is 356 pages of one of the most impressive volumes of botanical photography ever printed. You can get a copy of Botanica Magnifica by Jonathan Singer and support the show using the Amazon Link in today's Show Notes for around $62   Today’s Botanic Spark Reviving the little botanic spark in your heart January 25, 2002 On this day, the Vancouver Sun shared an article by Steve Whysall called Three R’s Hold the Key to Garden Renovation. The three R’s are: Restore, Renovate, and Revitalize. Here’s an excerpt: “To pull it off, you have got to be honest. You need to look at your garden without sentiment or romanticism and admit (painful as this may be) that things have not worked out as planned and that changes are needed. For help, you could call in an expert. Someone like Nenagh McCutcheon, of Langley, is now a specialist at renovating and upgrading gardens that have gone astray. At one time, Nenagh was a copywriter in advertising… She is now one of Vancouver's ace garden designers. For example, in West Vancouver, she came to the rescue of a waterfront garden grossly overgrown by red roses and mugo pines. "Most of it had to go," says Nenagh. "To renovate, it's usually a case of digging up 80 percent of what's there, everything that can be lifted and turfing what you don't want, replanting what is worth recycling, and then bringing in new stuff."  What are the signs that a garden needs a makeover?  Loss of structure is the most obvious, Nenagh says. "It's a sign things are wrong when trees and shrubs are too big for their location. Or paths are overgrown. Or arbors and arches are lost under mounds of foliage. All these are symptoms that a garden has lost its identity."  Loss of color is another clue.  "Perhaps a tree that once had a small canopy now casts so much shade that instead of growing roses, you have to start planting hostas."  Or perhaps plants that were once a comfortable distance apart have grown too close, and the effect is jarring, she says. The loss of a sense of peace and tranquility is another sign. "And, of course, there is always the fact that you may be simply bored with how your garden looks."  Step one is to evaluate what plants are worth keeping.  Some will be too big to move.  Some can be "shovel pruned" dug up and tossed out. The next step is to prune.  Intelligent pruning can change things dramatically. Not only can you end up with a more attractive plant, but the pruning will also let in more light and air so other plants can thrive. [Another step is to remove old or unwanted plants.] "When you lift plants, it gives you the opportunity to revitalize the soil. Over time old soil can become sour and compact. When you renovate, you empty the border and can bring in new soil."    Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener. And remember: "For a happy, healthy life, garden every day."

Tim James is founder and CEO of ChemicalFreeBody.com, a mission-based organization that is passionate about helping everybody to ignite their highest excitement in life by putting themselves and their health first. Tim discovered a new way to view health and nutrition when he visited a world-renowned health institute that specialized in detoxing & nutrition with his best friend, who was being treated for cancer. Ever since, Tim has been striving for optimal health and has completely transformed his life and body, dropping nearly 40 lbs and successfully treating his own health problems! When Charles was considered cancer-free after 2 years, Chemical Free Body was born with the mission to share the power in taking responsibility for one’s own well-being! It's a transformational journey, and individuals have to dig deep to find what works. Tim shares his knowledge with thousands of people to help them transform themselves! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/sprout-connectors/support

On Halloween night 1984, Doreen Erbert was 8 months pregnant. She and her second husband, Charles were going to welcome a baby boy in about a month. Doreen and Charles were ecstatic at the prospect of being parents again, especially after they suffered pregnancy loss in the years prior. Doreen had also suffered the loss of her first child with her first husband in a terrible accident. After trick-or-treating with their 4-year-old daughter, Charles told Doreen he was going to run an errand and returned home after only 15 minutes. When Charles came home, he knew something was very wrong. The front door was ajar, and when Charles went further into the house, he found a scene straight out of a horror movie. Listen to this week’s episode to find out more.To learn more about how you can support us and become a Patreon Member, please go to www.patreon.com/tntcrimes or www.tntcrimes.com.  IG: @tntcrimespodcastFACEBOOK: @tntcrimespodcastTwitter: @tntcrimespodThis week's podcast promo is for Apple for Teacher.  You can learn more by going to:FB - https://www.facebook.com/applefortheteacherpodcastTwitter - https://twitter.com/AppleforTeacherInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/apple_for_the_teacher_podcast/Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/apple-for-the-teacher/id1473698720Sources and Special Thanks to:People v. William Michael Dennis, 17 Cal.4th 468UPI ArticleLake County Record-Bee ArticleThe San Francisco Examiner Article 

What do you think of when you hear accountability? For a lot of us it sounds like someone telling us what to do or not to do. Maybe it sounds like a personal parole officer. Based on that, it's not something any of us would be interesting in.Accountability isn't meant to be a limitation, but a tool that can help us exceed the limits we have on our own. A good accountability relationship can help us reach our potential by keeping us aligned with who we want to be and what we say we want to do.When Charles and I did our 40-day plan, a simple morning phone call was the thing that kept us going, and this podcast is a product of that process. We hope after listening, you'll have a fresh approach and better idea of how accountability can help you do the very things you haven't been able to do on your own power.Welcome to the Conversation.- CP

Tim James is the founder and CEO of ChemicalFreeBody.com, a mission-based organization that is passionate about helping everybody to ignite their highest excitement in life by putting themselves and their health first. Tim discovered a new way to view health and nutrition when he visited a world-renowned health institute that specialized in detoxing & nutrition with his best friend Charles, who was being treated for cancer. Ever since, Tim has been striving for optimal health and has completely transformed his life and body, dropping nearly 40 lbs and successfully treating his own health problems! When Charles was considered cancer-free after 2 years, Chemical Free Body was born with the mission to share the power in taking responsibility for one’s own well-being! It's a transformational journey, and individuals have to dig deep to find what works. Tim shares his knowledge with thousands of people to help them transform themselves! Use promo code: healthy at checkout to receive a discount for your first purchase on www.chemicalfreebody.com.

In this episode of The Plant Trainers Podcast, we talk with Tim James all about living foods and food combining. Food combining is not something we have studied, tried personally, or done with any of our clients before. We did think it was a good concept for people to learn about and continue their own research if it is something they are interested in. If you are someone who finds themselves asking if there could be more to their healing journey, you may find it quite interesting. We know you'll love his 4 Core Secrets, so stay tuned to the end.  Tim James is founder and CEO of ChemicalFreeBody.com, a mission-based organization that is passionate about helping everybody to ignite their highest excitement in life by putting themselves and their health first. Tim discovered a new way to view health and nutrition when he visited a world-renowned health institute that specialized in detoxing & nutrition with his best friend Charles, who was being treated for cancer. Ever since, Tim has been striving for optimal health and has completely transformed his life and body, dropping nearly 40 lbs and successfully treating his own health problems! When Charles was considered cancer-free after 2 years, Chemical Free Body was born with the mission to share the power in taking responsibility for one’s own well-being! It's a transformational journey, and individuals have to dig deep to find what works. Tim shares his knowledge with thousands of people to help them transform themselves! In this episode we discuss:  Finding plant-based  Living foods  Soil depletion  Growing your own food  Food combining  Improving digestion  Where to research  4 core secrets 

Tim James is founder and CEO of ChemicalFreeBody.com, a mission-based organization that is passionate about helping everybody to ignite their highest excitement in life by putting themselves and their health first. Tim discovered a new way to view health and nutrition when he visited a world-renowned health institute that specialized in detoxing & nutrition with his best friend Charles, who was being treated for cancer. Ever since, Tim has been striving for optimal health and has completely transformed his life and body, dropping nearly 40 lbs and successfully treating his own health problems! When Charles was considered cancer-free after 2 years, Chemical Free Body was born with the mission to share the power in taking responsibility for one’s own well-being! It's a transformational journey, and individuals have to dig deep to find what works. Tim shares his knowledge with thousands of people to help them transform themselves! Tim James Vroom Veer Stories Was a big hunter & meat eater when younger; had his own "TJ" he used to brand his steaksGot really sick and started to notice he was over weight and even had blood in this stool; didn't want to see a doctor and got real sick and ruined a vacation for him and his familyHad one close friend die from cancer; another friend was given a death sentence from his doctor; Tim went with him to a natural medicine retreat that saved his friends life and changed his life forever Learned just how bad and SAD the Standard American Diet really is; makes us sick and kills us slowlyHow to take control of your diet, gut health, healthy clean water, breathing and ground your body on the earthLearn the 4 core secrets to improve your own health; 3 of the 4 are free; Weed and CBD is really better than booze...duh!; What is aspirin made of? White Willow bark! use that instead of aspirin Connections Website (Chemical Free Body) Use Coupon Code: VVV for 5% discount

Today I am honored to have fellow podcaster, Angela Bowen join me to review the cute, cuddly and deadly episode, The Raccoon! The Raccoon was originally released on November 20, 1974 and is Season 1 Episode 10 "Blaming herself when Laura's doll breaks during a game of catch, Mary is delighted to give her sad, little sister an abandoned, baby raccoon. After Pa reluctantly agrees to let her keep him, Laura names him "Jasper", teaches him tricks and tries to keep the mischief-maker out of trouble. But one day, Jasper bites Jack, the Ingalls' dog, and disappears into the woods. When Charles later shoots a snarling, rabid raccoon who is killing the chickens and begins to watch Jack for signs of rabies, a tearful Mary reveals a terrible secret... Jasper had also bitten Laura who made Mary promise not to tell."

When did you make your first million? Charles got his first million when he was working on his first branch of Cotton Depot. During that time, profit was really good, and he was incredibly happy the moment when he found out he got his first million. During this journey to a million, what were some of the principles that helped you make that first million? A good name matters a lot in the field of fabrics. That's important because the business model in the fabrics industry focuses on loaning.  Charles was fortunate enough that his parents had already built up a good name and that was brought down to him and his siblings. This helped them negotiate better terms with fabric manufacturers that led to better profits for him. What Charles focused on was to protect and maintain his name. He had to always practice a certain level of integrity to keep his name clean and attractive to his business partners. Do you have a separate bank account dedicated to all of your liabilities? At the start of his business, Charles had his own and his business' money mixed in one account. He segregated by putting percentages on his money. He relied on his gut feel. However, when the business gets larger, you need to separate your personal money with your business' money. There should be a strict line between these two. Now that you handle Strat Quad and Dropify, do you still sell fabrics? Charles no longer sells fabrics because he already sold Cotton Depot. His passion shifted from putting up fabric stores all over the Philippines to e-commerce mainly because his heart went where the money was.  e-commerce is a booming industry. Charles decided to fully focus on e-commerce once it grew exponentially bigger than his fabric business. Slowly, e-commerce became his primary livelihood while the fabrics business turned into a hobby.  During this transition, were there times when you neglected Cotton Depot? Charles was not afraid to admit that he was guilty of neglecting the Cotton Depot at that time. It reached the point where mismanagement occurred. Fortunately, he already foresaw this happening and it led to his decision to sell the business.  They didn't sell the business because it was on a decline. In fact, it was still making a profit. Nothing was wrong with the technicalities of the business. It's just that Charles' heart wasn't there anymore.  If it was still making money, wasn't it still good passive income? What were some other factors that led to this decision? Passive income is money that comes in without the need for you to manage it. The problem with retail is that it requires meticulous supply chain management. You have to make sure that things are going smoothly. Charles tried hiring people to fill in the gap of him not being focused on it anymore. But when he realized that he no longer wanted to continue minding this business, he already chose to sell it instead. When Charles had already decided to sell fabrics, he had to make sure that he sells the business to someone who has experience. He wanted to sell it to someone who loves the fabrics industry—someone who will spend more to keep it alive. That's why he gave his business to the highest bidder. Was it difficult selling your business? How was your experience? Charles isn't a person that dwells one the more technical aspects of selling a business, mostly because of his upbringing. He doesn't need meticulous documentation or an intricate process, all he needs is the trust between two business people. Support the show (https://tribe.leadershipstack.com/)

The Seattle home where the Emery brothers have lived since 1962 has a new wooden fence. Lindsey Baum (center) went missing in 2009. Her remains were found in 2017. While the Emery brothers have been investigated in connection with her disappearance and murder, no charges have ever been filed for this case.In the summer of 2017, Charles Emery had been diagnosed with dementia. Doctors felt it was no longer safe for the 82 year old to continue living in the two story Seattle home he’d been sharing with his brothers for more than 50 years.  His niece was named his legal guardian, and she began the process of gathering Charles' belongings so she could move him to an assisted living facility.The three Emery brothers never married.  Charles, the oldest, had worked for decades at Seattle Children’s Hospital.  His younger brother, 80 year old Thomas, had a variety of jobs over the years.  And his youngest brother, 78 year old Edwin, had been a long time Boeing employee.  They were reclusive, largely staying holed up in their home in the exclusive Green Lake neighborhood that was filled to the brim with things they’d collected over the years.Newspapers and books lay alongside handwritten manifestos detailing the rape and murder of children.  Old pots and pans were piled up along with items of children’s clothing, including dirty underwear. Even in the crawl space, there was stashed a pink child-sized hat partially buried in the ground.When Charles' niece came across a child-sized penny loafer that contained a tiny bottle of vodka with her initials written on it, she knew it was time to call the police."There is a subculture that thinks incest is a good thing, a very normal thing, that there's nothing wrong with it. These guys were one of those families," explained Seattle Police Captain Mike Edwards.Would the Emery women ever get justice? Did the brothers crimes extend beyond their own family? And what connection do they have with several missing girls whose cases remain unsolved to this day?If you have any information on the criminal activity of the Emery brothers or the murder of Lindsey Baum, please contact the Internet Crimes Against Children Unit of the Seattle Police Department. A similar poster was found in the Emery brothers' Seattle home.

There are a handful of albums that have never lost their popularity, but just get stronger over time, and The Joshua Tree would certainly be one of these giant albums. The fifth studio album by U2 would see the group coming back from the experimental feel of their previous album, The Unforgettable Fire, and taking on a more conventional approach. The Joshua Tree took the theme of "America" as the band had been spending significant time on tour in the country, and Bono was reading American novelists like Flannery O'Connor at the time. The Edge was inspired by American blues and country artists, and several tracks on the album have a blues feel.Autumn Fischer from WSB Radio’s “The Von Haessler Doctrine” (SFW) as well as her own podcast “One Topic” (NSFW) joins us for this week's fun and shenanigans. Where the Streets Have No NameThis first track on the album takes its name from the idea that you can tell a person's religion and income based on the Belfast street on which they live. The repeating arpeggio with a delay effect that kicks off the song is a signature sound for the band.One Tree HillThis song references a volcanic peak in New Zealand which his an important memorial place for the Maori people. It was written in memory of Greg Carroll, a Maori roadie for the band who was killed in a motorcycle accident in Dublin in 1986.Bullet the Blue SkyBono was inspired to write these lyrics as a protest song after a trip to Nicaragua and El Salvador. He saw the toll that the US military intervention in the region placed on local peasants. It has taken on different meanings in concerts, from consumerism to handgun violence to Nazism. The tune started as a jam session.In God's CountryThe idea of this track is that the US is a desert rose, or a siren - both sad and seductive. It also talks about the lack of political ideas in the West, portraying western thought as an arid place. ENTERTAINMENT TRACK:“At This Moment” by Billy Vera and the BeatersThis song was featured in the movie “Blind Date,”and was earlier used in the TV Sitcom "Family Ties."STAFF PICKS:“We're Ready” by BostonWayne takes us to Boston's third studio album. It was a long time between their second and third efforts, and this one was perceived as a bit of a disappointment. However, the album still maintains that distinctive Boston sound.“Mandolin Rain” by Bruce Hornsby and the RangeBrian's staff pick features the incredible piano work of Bruce Hornsby from his first album “The Way It Is.” The song is about a failed southern romance.“Heartbreak Beat” by The Psychedelic FursRob brings us into the alternative rock genre. The band called themselves “The Psychedelic Furs” to separate themselves from the punk movement, who didn't care for psychedelic music. This was their only top 40 song in the U.S.“(I Just) Died In Your Arms” by Cutting CrewSpecial guest Autumn Fischer features the "echo snare" sound of British band Cutting Crew from their debut studio album. She became a fan of this song from the radio on Grand Theft Auto.“Baby Grand” by Billy JoelBruce's staff pick finishes us off this week. It features a double piano duet with Joel and piano legend Ray Charles. Billy Joel named his daughter Alexa Ray, with the middle name being for Charles. When Charles reached out about doing a duet, Joel wrote this song in a single night, using "Georgia On My Mind" as the template for the style he wanted to achieve.  

Today we celebrate the botanist who is considered the Father of Taxonomy and the young Landscape Architect who learned by taking weekly walking tours of gardens. We'll learn about the botanist who saved Kew Garden and the most famous garden designer you’ve never heard of. We'll listen to a little garden folklore for November and an amusing poem about daylight savings. We Grow That Garden Library with today's book which features the gardens of Russell Page, and you can get it on Amazon for under $4, which is highway robbery - or Landscape robbery in this case. I'll talk about digging up those dahlias and then share the super cute story about a young botanist and the housekeeper who was sure he was up to no good.     But first, let's catch up on a few recent events. National Fig Week  It’s the start of National Fig Week which runs through the 7th of November.   All of the figs that are growing in the United States are growing in the Central Valley of California where 28 million pounds of figs are harvested every year.   It was Captain Bligh, who is honored as the planter of the very first fig in Tasmania back in 1792.   The Greek word for fig is syco. It’s why one species of the fig tree is called the sycamore.   Fig trees are in the ficus genus and the Mulberry family. The popular house plant, the rubber plant, is also a species of ficus.   And, figs are the sweetest of all fruits. They are made up of 55% sugar.         Today Fine Gardening shared a great post called Treasures in the November Garden, and it featured posts from a gardener named Carla Zambelli Mudry   Carla shared beautiful images from her November garden, where she commented that the fall witch hazel had started blooming, and her Sochi tea plant is still producing lovely white flowers.   The post features pictures of her witch hazel in bloom. Gardeners have soft spots for the delicate yellow spidery flowers of the witch hazel.   The common Witch Hazel virginiana can grow in zones 3 - 8.   Sochi tea Camellia sinensis is hearty in zones 7 to 10. Now, to make the tea, the leaves are harvested. But again, as with the witch hazel, it’s the beautiful blooms of this camellia that will steal your heart.   This post was part of Fine Gardening’s garden photo of the day. If you’d like to share your garden with Fine Gardening, you can send them 5 to 10 images of your garden to GPOD (which is short for a Garden picture of the day) at Fine Gardening.com (GPOD@FineGardening.com) along with a few comments about the plants in the photos. You can share anything your successes and failures funny stories or favorite plants.     Finally, my good friend, Kathy Jentz, over at Washington Gardener Magazine, shared 10 Things To Do With a Pumpkin After Halloween.   Her list is so great I wanted to share with you here: 1. Compost it. 2. Puree and cook it. 3. Make it into a birdfeeder. 4. Turn it into a planter. 5. Use it as a serving bowl for soup. 6. Pickle the peel. 7. Apply a face mask. 8. Make doggie treats. 9. Wash and roast the seeds. 10. Save a few seeds to grow another pumpkin next year!     Now, if you'd like to check out these curated articles for yourself, you're in luck - because I share all of it with the Listener Community in the Free Facebook Group - The Daily Gardener Community. So there’s no need to take notes or track down links - the next time you're on Facebook, just search for Daily Gardener Community and request to join. I'd love to meet you in the group.   Brevities     #OTD Today is the anniversary of the death of Carl Linnaeus, who died on this day 1783. Thirty years earlier, on May 1st, 1753, the publication of his masterpiece Species Plantarum changed plant taxonomy forever.   It gave Linnaeus the moniker Father of Taxonomy; his naming system is called binomial nomenclature. And, it was Linnaeus himself who said: “God created, Linnaeus ordered.”   One side note worth mentioning is how Linnaeus' collection ended up leaving Sweden and finding a home in London:   When Linnaeus died in 1778, his belongings were sold. Joseph Banks, the president of the Linnean Society, acted quickly, buying everything of horticultural value on behalf of the society. Linnaeus' notebooks and specimens were on a ship bound for England by the time the king of Sweden realized Linnaeus' legacy was no longer in Sweden. He sent a fast navy ship in pursuit of Banks' precious cargo, but it was too late.  And so, Linnaeus’s collection is in London at the Linnaeus Society's Burlington House. And, it was Joseph Banks who secured the legacy of Linnaeus. Banks spread Linnaeus's ideas across the globe, which was easier for him to accomplish since he was based in London, the hub for the science of botany.         #OTD  Today is the birthday of Charles Eliot, who was born on this day in 1859.   Eliot was the son of a prominent Boston family. In 1869, the year his mother died, his father Charles William Eliot became the president of Harvard University.   In 1882 Charles went to Harvard to study botany. A year later, he began apprenticing with the landscape firm of Frederick Law Olmsted.    As a young landscape architect, Eliot enjoyed visiting different natural areas, and he conducted regular walking tours of different nature areas around Boston.   In his diary for 1878, Eliot did something kind of neat; he made a list. It was basically what we call a listicle nowadays. He titled it "A Partial List of Saturday Walks before 1878".  Isn't that fabulous?   As a young architect, Eliot spent 13 months touring England and Europe between 1885 and 1886. The trip was actually Olmsted’s idea, and it no doubt added to Eliot's appreciation of various landscape concepts. During this trip, Eliot kept a journal where he wrote down his thoughts and made sketches of the places he was visiting. Eliot's benchmark was always Boston, and throughout his memoirs, he was continually comparing new landscapes to the beauty of his native landscape in New England.   Eliot's story ended too soon. He died at 37 from spinal meningitis.   Since Eliot had been working on plans for The Arnold Arboretum, he'd gotten to know Charles Sprague Sargent. So, it was Sargent who wrote a tribute to Eliot and featured it in his weekly journal called Garden and Forest.    Eliot's death had a significant impact on his father. At times, the two had struggled to connect. Charles didn’t like it when his dad got remarried. And, their personalities were very different, and Charles could be a little melancholy.   When Charles died, his dad, Charles Sr., began to cull through his work and he was shocked to discover all that he had done.   In April 1897, Charles Sr. confided to a friend,   "I am examining his letters and papers and I am filled with wonder at what he accomplished in the 10 years of professional life. I should’ve died without ever having appreciated his influence. His death has shown it to me."   Despite his heavy workload as the president of Harvard, Charles Sr. immediately set about compiling all of his son's work and used it to write a book called Charles Eliot Landscape Architect. The book came out in 1902, and today it is considered a classic work in the field of landscape architecture.             #OTD    Today is the anniversary of the death of the botanist John Lindley who died on this day in 1865. Lindley was a British gardener, a botanist, and an orchidologist. He also served as secretary to the Royal Horticultural Society for 43 years. This is why the Lindley Library at the RHS is named in honor of John Lindley.   Lindley‘s dad owned a nursery and an orchard. And Lindley grew up helping with the family business.   In 1815, he went to London. He became friends with William Jackson Hooker, who, in turn, introduced Lindley to Sir Joseph Banks, who hired Lindley to work in his herbarium.   When Banks died, the fate of the Royal Botanic Gardens was put in jeopardy. Banks' death corresponded with the death of King George III, who was the patron of the garden. These deaths created an opening for the British government to question whether the garden should remain open. To explore their options, the Government asked Lindley, as well as Joseph Paxton and John Wilson, to put together a recommendation. Ultimately, Lindley felt the institution should be the people’s garden and the headquarters for botany in England. The government rejected the proposal and decided to close the garden. On February 11, 1840, Lindley ingeniously demanded that the issue be put before the Parliament. His advocacy brought the matter to the publics' attention; the garden-loving British public was not about to lose the Royal Botanic. And, so, Lindley saved Kew Gardens, and William Hooker was chosen as the new director.    Lindley shortened the genus Orchidaceae to orchid – which is much more friendly to pronounce - and when he died, Lindley's massive orchid collection was moved to a new home at Kew.   As for Lindley, there are over 200 plant species named for him.  There is "lindleyi", "lindleyana", "lindleyanum", "lindleya" and "lindleyoides".   And here’s a little-remembered factoid about Lindley - he was blind in one eye.              #OTD   Today is the birthday of the British gardener, garden designer, and landscape architect Russell Page who was born on this day in 1906. His full name was Montague Russell Page.   Page's is known for his book called The Education of a Gardener. The book is a classic in garden literature. In it, Page shares his vast knowledge of plants and trees and design. The book ends with a description of his dream garden.   In the book, there are many wonderful quotes by Page.    Page wrote:   "I know nothing whatever of many aspects of gardening and very little of a great many more. But I never saw a garden from which I did not learn something and seldom met a gardener who did not, in some way or another, help me."   First published in 1962, Page's book shares his charming anecdotes and timeless gardening advice. He wrote: ”I like gardens with good bones and an affirmed underlying structure. I like well-made and well-marked paths, well-built walls, well-defined changes in level. I like pools and canals, paved sitting places and a good garden in which to picnic or take a nap.”   and   "If you wish to make anything grow, you must understand it, and understand it in a very real sense. 'Green fingers' are a fact, and a mystery only to the unpracticed. But green fingers are the extensions of a verdant heart."    Page is considered the first modern garden designer. Like Piet Oudolf, Page used flowers to create living, natural paintings.   And although he designed Gardens for the Duke of Windsor and Oscar de la Renta, it was Russell Page who said:   "I am the most famous garden designer you’ve never heard of."   Page designed the Gardens at the Frick Collection in New York City in 1977   In 2014 when the Frick was making plans to expand, they initially considered demolishing the Page garden. After a year of facing public backlash in support of the garden - which was something the museum never anticipated - in May 2015, the Frick decided to keep the garden.   During the year of debating the fate of the garden, the Frick indicated that they believed the garden was never meant to be a permanent part of the museum. But, all that changed when Charles Birnbaum, the founder of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, decided to do his homework. Birnbaum discovered an old Frick press release from 1977, where they proudly introduced the Page landscape as a permanent garden. Birnbaum shared his discovery on the Huffington Post, and thanks to him, the 3700 square-foot Page garden lives on for all of us to enjoy.       Unearthed Words   If there’s ice in November that will bear a duck, There’ll be nothing after but sludge and muck. ~English folk-lore rhyme, first printed c.1876     "In spring when maple buds are red, We turn the clock an hour ahead; Which means each April that arrives, We lose an hour out of our lives. Who cares? When autumn birds in flocks Fly southward, back we turn the clocks, And so regain a lovely thing That missing hour we lost in spring." -   Phyllis McGinley, Daylight Savings Time     Today's Grow That Garden Library book recommendation: The Gardens of Russell Page by Gabrielle Zuylen and Marina Schinz Schinz and van Zuylen researched and photographed all of Page's best work, both early and late, and some now no longer extant. They share some of his private files and unpublished writing and help us get to know Page and his work more keenly.  The book shares over 250 photographs that capture the exceptional beauty of Page creations in England, America, and throughout continental Europe. I love the tidbit about Page that is shared in the introduction: "In his youth, he had wanted to be a painter, but acquaintances in Paris intent on making gardens helped change his direction. In later years, when he was asked whether he was more of a plantsman or a designer, his answer was understated: "I know more about plants than most designers and more about design than most plantsmen." In fact, he had an exceptional understanding, knowledge, and feel for, plants allied to a strong sense of architecture." This book came out in 2008. You can get used copies using the Amazon Link in today's Show Notes for under $4.     Today's Garden Chore If you've had your first frost, that's the signal to gardeners to dig up their dahlia and canna tubers and get them stored for next spring. Once they are out of the ground, I brush them off; removing any extra soil, and then I put them in a basket or a container with plenty of perlite and keep them on a nice cool, dark shelf in the basement storage room. The perlite keeps the tubers dry and allows them to breathe.      Something Sweet  Reviving the little botanic spark in your heart   When I was researching John Lindley, I stumbled on an adorable story about him.   Lindley arrived in England when he was a teenager. Naturally, he needed a place to stay, so Hooker graciously took him in and gave him a room at his home called Halesworth.   The story goes that, over the course of a few weeks, the Halesworth housekeeper had observed that Lindley‘s bed was always neat as a pin. It was clear he never slept in it.   The housekeeper immediately began to wonder what Lindley was doing and where was he sleeping. She began to worry that he might not be the kind of person they wanted living at Halesworth.   When her worry got the best of her, she brought the matter to Hooker's attention. Anxiety is contagious, and the housekeeper's concern made Hooker worry. So, he confronted Lindley and asked him to account for his unused bed.   Lindley calmly explained that he was hoping to go to Sumatra to collect plants.  In anticipation of the physical difficulties of plant exploration, Lindley had been spending every night sleeping on the boards of the hardwood floor in his room.   Lindley got to keep living at Halesworth. He wrote his first book there called Observations on the Structure of Fruits. He never made it to Sumatra.     Thanks for listening to the daily gardener, and remember: "For a happy, healthy life, garden every day."

Hello again and thanks for listening to Cauldron I'm your host Cullen. Today we have another whopper of a story for you but first some housekeeping. As always check us out on the social media stuff just search Cauldron on Facebook or Instagram. Please rate and review on iTunes, shout out to Persons117 for the latest review! Also, check out Patreon and become a producer for the show. A buck a month helps get research materials, production equipment, and show art. Welcome aboard to our latest producer Methuselah, thanks for your support! All right enough of the business lets get stuck in at Poltava! Let's go back 310 years to the plains of southern Ukraine, fresh of a winter so cold birds fell frozen out of the air. Charles XII of Sweden put his kingdom on the line outside a city called Poltava. After the collapse of the Teutonic knights, the Baltic region and Eastern Europe was in disarray. A power vacuum was left by the old order of crusading knights, but for some time no power emerged preeminent. Out of the madness and horrible violence of the 30 Years War emerged a Lion. Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden was one of the great commanders in history and clawed out an empire. Seemingly overnight France, England, Spain, and the Netherlands had to acknowledge a new member to their elite club. After Gustavus glorious death on the field, Sweden was set up well for the future. Large swaths of Denmark and Germany, as well as most of the Baltic region and east end of the Gulf of Finland, were under Swedish control. When Charles the 11th died the army he left behind was lithe, sinewy, and ready to be put through its paces. In the hands of a genius tactician, this army would be most formidable… This week’s main source - Peter the Great: His Life and World by Robert K. Massie Music - From Russia With Love by Huma-Huma Image by Melhaks@fiver.com Questions or Corrections - https://www.cauldronpodcast.com/sendustheories To support the show got to https://www.patreon.com/user?u=8278347 and search Cauldron Podcast For images, videos, and sources check us out on Facebook @cauldronpodcast Instagram @cauldronpodcast Spotify iTunes

Episode thirty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Tutti Frutti" by Little Richard, and at the rather more family-unfriendly subject the song was originally about. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (Apologies that this one is a day late -- health problems kept me from getting the edit finished). Also, a reminder for those who didn't see the previous post -- my patreon backers are now getting ten-minute mini-episodes every week, and the first one is up, and I guested on Jaffa Cake Jukebox this week, talking about the UK top twenty for January 18 1957. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of the information used here comes from The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Authorised Biography by Charles White, which is to all intents and purposes Richard's autobiography, as much of the text is in his own words. A warning for those who might be considering buying this though -- it contains descriptions of his abuse as a child, and is also full of internalised homo- bi- and trans-phobia. This collection contains everything Richard recorded before 1962, from his early blues singles through to his gospel albums from after he temporarily gave up rock and roll for the church. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There are a handful of musicians in the history of rock music who seem like true originals. You can always trace their influences, of course, but when you come across one of them, no matter how clearly you can see who they were copying and who they were inspired by, you still just respond to them as something new under the sun. And of all the classic musicians of rock and roll, probably nobody epitomises that more than Little Richard. Nobody before him sounded like he did, and while many later tried -- everyone from Captain Beefheart to Paul McCartney -- nobody ever quite sounded like him later. And there are good reasons for that, because Little Richard was -- and still is -- someone who is quite unlike anyone else. [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Tutti Frutti", just the opening phrase] This episode will be the first time we see queer culture becoming a major part of the rock and roll story -- we've dealt with possibly-LGBT people before, of course, with Big Mama Thornton and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and with Johnny Ray in the Patreon-only episode about him, but this is the first time that an expression of sexuality has become part and parcel of the music itself, to the extent that we have to discuss it. And here, again, I have to point out that I am going to get things very wrong when I'm talking about Little Richard. I am a cis straight white man in Britain in the twenty-first century. Little Richard is a queer black man from the USA, and we're talking about the middle of the twentieth century. I'm fairly familiar with current British LGBT+ culture, but even that is as an outsider. I am trying, always, to be completely fair and to never say anything that harms a marginalised group, but if I do so inadvertantly, I apologise. When I say he's queer, I'm using the word not in its sense as a slur, but in the sense of an umbrella term for someone whose sexuality and gender identity are too complex to reduce to a single label, because he has at various times defined himself as gay, but he has also had relationships with women, and because from reading his autobiography there are so many passages where he talks about wishing he had been born a woman that it may well be that had he been born fifty years later he would have defined himself as a bisexual trans woman rather than a gay man. I will still, though, use "he" and "him" pronouns for him in this and future episodes, because those are the pronouns he uses himself. Here we're again going to see something we saw with Rosetta Tharpe, but on a much grander scale -- the pull between the secular and the divine. You see, as well as being some variety of queer, Little Richard is also a very, very, religious man, and a believer in a specific variety of fundamentalist Christianity that believes that any kind of sexuality or gender identity other than monogamous cis heterosexual is evil and sinful and the work of the Devil. He believes this very deeply and has at many times tried to live his life by this, and does so now. I, to put it as mildly as possible, disagree. But to understand the man and his music at all, you have to at least understand that this is the case. He has swung wildly between being almost the literal embodiment of the phrase "sex and drugs and rock and roll" and being a preacher who claims that homosexuality, bisexuality, and being trans are all works of the literal Devil -- several times he's gone from one to the other. As of 2017, and the last public interview I've seen with him, he has once again renounced rock and roll and same-sex relationships. I hope that he's happy in his current situation. But at the time we're talking about, he was a young person, and very much engaged in those things. [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Tutti Frutti", just the opening phrase] Richard Penniman was the third of twelve children, born to parents who had met at a Pentecostal holiness meeting when they were thirteen and married when they were fourteen. Of all the children, Richard was the one who was most likely to cause trouble. He had a habit of playing practical jokes involving his own faeces -- wrapping them up and giving them as presents to old ladies, or putting them in jars in the pantry for his mother to find. But he was also bullied terribly as a child, because he was disabled. One of his legs was significantly shorter than the other, his head was disproportionately large, and his eyes were different sizes. He was also subjected to homophobic abuse from a very early age, because the gait with which he walked because of his legs was vaguely mincing. At the age of fourteen, he decided to leave school and become a performer. He started out by touring with a snake-oil salesman. Snake oil is a traditional Chinese medicine, about which there have been claims made for centuries, and those claims might well be true. But snake oil in the US was usually a mixture of turpentine, tallow, camphor, and capsaicin. It wasn't much different to Vicks' VaporRub and similar substances, but it was sold as a cure-all for serious illnesses. Snake-oil salesmen would travel from town to town selling their placebo, and they would have entertainers performing with them in order to draw crowds. The young Richard Penniman travelled with "Doc Hudson", and would sing the one non-religious song he knew, "Caldonia" by Louis Jordan: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "Caldonia"] The yelps and hiccups in Jordan's vocals on that song would become a massive part of Richard's own vocal style. Richard soon left the medicine show, and started touring with a band, B. Brown and his orchestra, and it was while he was touring with that band that he grew his hair into the huge pompadour that would later become a trademark, and he also got the name "Little Richard". However, all the musicians in the band were older than him, so he moved on again to another touring show, and another, and another. In many of these shows, he would perform as a female impersonator, which started when one of the women in one of the shows took sick and Richard had to quickly cover for her by putting on her costume, but soon he was performing in shows that were mostly drag acts, performing to a largely gay crowd. It was while he was performing in these shows that he met the first of his two biggest influences. Billy Wright, like Richard, had been a female impersonator for a while too. Like Richard, he had a pompadour haircut, and he was a fairly major blues star in the period from 1949 through 1951, being one of the first blues singers to sing with gospel-inspired mannerisms: [Excerpt: Billy Wright, "Married Woman's Boogie"] 5) Richard became something of a Billy Wright wannabe, and started incorporating parts of Wright's style into his performances. He also learned that Wright was using makeup on stage -- Pancake 31 -- and started applying that same makeup to his own skin, something he would continue to do throughout his performing career. Wright introduced Richard to Zenas Sears, who was one of the many white DJs all across America who were starting to become successful by playing black music and speaking in approximations of African-American Vernacular English -- people like Alan Freed and Dewey Phillips. Sears had connections with RCA Records, and impressed by Richard's talent, he got them to sign him. Richard's first single was called "Every Hour", and was very much a Billy Wright imitation: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Every Hour"] It was so close to Wright's style, in fact, that Wright soon recorded his own knock-off of Richard's song, "Every Evening". [Excerpt: Billy Wright, "Every Evening"] At this point Richard was solely a singer -- he hadn't yet started to play an instrument to accompany himself. That changed when he met Esquerita. Esquerita was apparently born Stephen Quincey Reeder, but he was known to everyone as "Eskew" Reeder, after his initials, and that then became Esquerita, partly as a pun on the word "excreta". Esquerita was another gay black R&B singer with a massive pompadour and a moustache. If Little Richard at this stage looked like a caricature of Billy Wright, Esquerita looked like a caricature of Little Richard. His hair was even bigger, he was even more flamboyant, and when he sang, he screamed even louder. And Esquerita also played the piano. Richard -- who has never been unwilling to acknowledge the immense debt he owed to his inspirations -- has said for years that Esquerita was the person who taught him how to play the piano, and that not only was his piano-playing style a copy of Esquerita's, Esquerita was better. It's hard to tell for sure exactly how much influence Esquerita actually had on Richard's piano playing, because Esquerita himself didn't make any records until after Richard did, at which point he was signed to his own record deal to be basically a Little Richard clone, but the records he did make certainly show a remarkable resemblance to Richard's later style: [Excerpt: Esquerita: "Believe Me When I Say Rock And Roll Is Here To Stay"] Richard soon learned to play piano, and he was seen by Johnny Otis, who was impressed. Otis said: "I see this outrageous person, good-looking and very effeminate, with a big pompadour. He started singing and he was so good. I loved it. He reminded me of Dinah Washington. He did a few things, then he got on the floor. I think he even did a split, though I could be wrong about that. I remember it as being just beautiful, bizarre, and exotic, and when he got through he remarked, “This is Little Richard, King of the Blues,” and then he added, “And the Queen, too!” I knew I liked him then." Otis recommended Richard to Don Robey, of Peacock Records, and Robey signed Richard and his band the Tempo Toppers. In early 1953, with none of his recordings for RCA having done anything, Little Richard and the Tempo Toppers went into the studio with another group, the Deuces of Rhythm, to record four tracks, issued as two singles: [Excerpt: Little Richard and the Tempo Toppers with the Deuces of Rhythm: "Ain't That Good News"] None of these singles had any success, and Richard was *not* getting on very well at all with Don Robey. Robey was not the most respectful of people, and Richard let everyone know how badly he thought Robey treated his artists. Robey responded by beating Richard up so badly that he got a hernia which hurt for years and necessitated an operation. Richard would record one more session for Peacock, at the end of the year, when Don Robey gave him to Johnny Otis to handle. Otis took his own band into the studio with Richard, and the four songs they recorded at that session went unreleased at the time, but included a version of "Directly From My Heart To You", a song Richard would soon rerecord, and another song called "Little Richard's Boogie": [Excerpt: Little Richard with Johnny Otis and his Orchestra, "Little Richard's Boogie"] Nobody was very happy with the recordings, and Richard was dropped by Peacock. He was also, around the same time, made to move away from Macon, Georgia, where he lived, after being arrested for "lewd conduct" -- what amounted to consensual voyeurism. And the Tempo Toppers had split up. Richard had been dumped by two record labels, his father had died recently, he had no band, and he wasn't allowed to live in his home town any more. Things seemed pretty low. But before he'd moved away, Richard had met Lloyd Price, and Price had suggested that Richard send a demo tape in to Specialty Records, Price's label. The tape lay unlistened at Specialty for months, and it was only because of Richard's constant pestering for them to listen to it that Bumps Blackwell, who was then in charge of A&R at Specialty, eventually got round to listening to it. This was an enormous piece of good fortune, in a way that neither of them fully realised at the time. Blackwell had been a longtime friend and colleague of Ray Charles. When Charles' gospel-influenced new sound had started making waves on the charts, Art Rupe, Specialty's owner, had asked Blackwell to find him a gospel-sounding R&B singer of his own to compete with Ray Charles. Blackwell listened to the tape, which contained two songs, one of which was an early version of "Wonderin'", and he could tell this was someone with as much gospel in his voice as Ray Charles had: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Wonderin'"] Blackwell and Rupe made an agreement with Don Robey to buy out his contract for six hundred dollars -- one gets the impression that Robey would have paid *them* six hundred dollars to get rid of Richard had they asked him. They knew that Richard liked the music of Fats Domino, and so they decided to hold their first session at Cosimo Matassa's studio, where Domino recorded, and with the same session musicians that Domino used. Blackwell also brought in two great New Orleans piano players, Huey "Piano" Smith and James Booker, both of whom were players in the same style as Domino. You can hear Smith, for example, on his hit "The Rockin' Pneumonia and the Boogie-Woogie Flu" from a couple of years later: [Excerpt: Huey "Piano" Smith, "The Rockin' Pneumonia and the Boogie-Woogie Flu"] All of these people were veterans of sessions either for Domino or for artists who had worked in Domino's style, like Lloyd Price or Smiley Lewis. The only difference here was that it would be Bumps Blackwell who did the arrangement and production, rather than Dave Bartholomew like on Domino's records. However, the session didn't go well at all. Blackwell had heard that Richard was an astounding live act, but he was just doing nothing in the studio. As Blackwell later put it "If you look like Tarzan and sound like Mickey Mouse it just doesn’t work out." They did record some usable material -- "Wonderin'", which we heard before, came out OK, and they recorded "I'm Just a Lonely, Lonely, Guy" by a young songwriter called Dorothy LaBostrie, which seemed to go OK. They also cut a decent version of "Directly From My Heart to You", a song which Richard had previously recorded with Johnny Otis: [Excerpt: Little RIchard, "Directly From My Heart to You"] So they had a couple of usable songs, but usable was about all you could say for them. They didn't have anything that would make an impact, nothing that would live up to Richard's potential. So Blackwell called a break, and they headed off to get themselves something to eat, at the Dew Drop Inn. And something happened there that would change Little RIchard's career forever. The Dew Drop Inn had a piano, and it had an audience that Little Richard could show off in front of. He went over to the piano, started hammering the keys, and screamed out: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Tutti Frutti", just the opening phrase] On hearing Richard sing the song he performed then, Bumps Blackwell knew two things pretty much instantly. The first was that that song would definitely be a hit if he could get it released. And the second was that there was no way on Earth that he could possibly put it out. "Tutti Frutti" started as a song that Richard sang more or less as a joke. There is a whole undercurrent of R&B in the fifties which has very, very, sexually explicit lyrics, and I wish I was able to play some of those songs on this podcast without getting it dumped into the adult-only section on iTunes, because some of them are wonderful, and others are hilarious. "Tutti Frutti" in its original form was part of this undercurrent, and had lyrics that were clearly not broadcastable -- "A wop bop a loo mop, a good goddam/Tutti Frutti, good booty/If it don't fit, don't force it, you can grease it, make it easy". But Bumps Blackwell thought that there was *something* that could be made into a hit there. Handily, they had a songwriter on hand. Dorothy LaBostrie was a young woman he knew who had been trying to write songs, but who didn't understand that songs had to have different melodies -- all her lyrics were written to the melody of the same song, Dinah Washington's "Blowtop Blues": [Excerpt: Dinah Washington, "Blowtop Blues"] But her lyrics had showed promise, and so Blackwell had agreed to record one of her songs, "I'm Just a Lonely Lonely Guy", with Richard. LaBostrie had been hanging round the studio to see how her song sounded when it was recorded, so Blackwell asked her to do a last-minute rewrite on “Tutti Frutti”, in the hope of getting something salvageable out of what had been a depressing session. But there was still a problem -- Richard, not normally a man overly known for his modesty, became embarrassed at singing his song to the young woman. Blackwell explained to him that he really didn't have much choice, and Richard eventually agreed to sing it to her -- but only if he was turned to face the wall, so he couldn't see this innocent-looking young woman's face. (I should note here that both Richard and LaBostrie have told different stories about this over the years -- both have claimed on several occasions that they were the sole author of the song and that the other didn't deserve any credit at all. But this is the story as it was told by others who were there.) LaBostrie's new lyrics were rudimentary at best. "I got a girl named Sue, she knows just what to do". But they fit the metre, they weren't about anal sex, and so they were going to be the new lyrics. The session was running late at this point, and when LaBostrie had the lyrics finished there was only fifteen minutes to go. It didn't matter that the lyrics were trite. What mattered was that they got a track cut to salvage the session. Blackwell didn't have time to teach the piano players the song, so he got Richard to play the piano himself. They cut the finished track in three takes, and Blackwell went back to California happy he at last had a hit: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Tutti Frutti"] "Tutti Frutti" was, indeed, a massive hit. It went to number twenty-one on the pop charts. But... you know what comes next. There was an inept white cover version, this time by Pat Boone. [excerpt: Pat Boone, "Tutti Frutti"] Now, notice that there, Boone changes the lyrics. In Richard's version, after all, he seems interested in both Sue and Daisy. A good Christian boy like Pat Boone couldn't be heard singing about such immorality. That one-line change (and a couple of other spot changes to individual words to make things into full sentences) seems to be why a songwriter called Joe Lubin is also credited for the song. Getting a third of a song like "Tutti Frutti" for that little work sounds like a pretty good deal, at least for Lubin, if not for Richard. Another way in which Richard got less than he deserved was that the publishing was owned by a company owned by Art Rupe. That company licensed the song to Specialty Records for half the normal mechanical licensing rate -- normally a publishing company would charge two cents per record pressed for their songs, but instead Specialty only had to pay one cent. This sort of cross-collateralisation was common with independent labels at the time, but it still rankled to Richard when he figured it out. Not that he was thinking about contracts at all at this point. He was becoming a huge star, and that meant he had to *break* a lot of contracts. He'd got concert bookings for several months ahead, but those bookings were in second-rate clubs, and he had to be in Hollywood to promote his new record and build a new career. But he also didn't want to get a reputation for missing gigs. There was only one thing to do -- hire an impostor to be Little Richard at these low-class gigs. So while Richard went off to promote his record, another young singer from Georgia with a pompadour and a gospel feel was being introduced with the phrase “Ladies and gentlemen—the hardest-working man in showbusiness today—Little Richard!” When James Brown went back to performing under his own name, he kept that introduction... Meanwhile, Richard was working on his second hit record. He and Blackwell decided that this record should be louder, faster, and more raucous than "Tutti Frutti" had been. If Pat Boone wanted to cover this one, he'd have to work a lot harder than he had previously. The basis for "Long Tall Sally" came from a scrap of lyric written by a teenage girl. Enotris Johnson had written a single verse of lyric on a scrap of paper, and had walked many miles to New Orleans to show the lyric to a DJ named Honey Chile. (Bumps Blackwell describes her as having walked from Opelousas, Mississippi, but there's no such place -- Johnson appears to have lived in Bogalusa, Louisiana). Johnson wanted to make enough money to pay for hospital for her sick aunt -- the "Aunt Mary" in the song, and thought that Little Richard might sing the song and get her the money. What she had was only a few lines, but Honey Chile had taken Johnson on as a charity project, and Blackwell didn't want to disappoint such an influential figure, so he and Richard hammered something together: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Long Tall Sally"] The song, about a "John" who "jumps back in the alley" when he sees his wife coming while he's engaged in activities of an unspecified nature with "Sally", who is long, tall, and bald, once again stays just on the broadcastable side of the line, while implying sex of a non-heteronormative variety, possibly with a sex worker. Despite this, and despite the attempts to make the song uncoverably raucous, Pat Boone still sold a million copies with his cover version: [Excerpt: Pat Boone, "Long Tall Sally"] So Little Richard had managed to get that good clean-cut wholesome Christian white boy Pat Boone singing songs which gave him a lot more to worry about than whether he was singing "Ain't" rather than "Isn't". But he was also becoming a big star himself -- and he was getting an ego to go along with it. And he was starting to worry whether he should be making this devil music at all. When we next look at Little Richard, we'll see just how the combination of self-doubt and ego led to his greatest successes and to the collapse of his career.  

Episode thirty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Tutti Frutti” by Little Richard, and at the rather more family-unfriendly subject the song was originally about. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (Apologies that this one is a day late — health problems kept me from getting the edit finished). Also, a reminder for those who didn’t see the previous post — my patreon backers are now getting ten-minute mini-episodes every week, and the first one is up, and I guested on Jaffa Cake Jukebox this week, talking about the UK top twenty for January 18 1957. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of the information used here comes from The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Authorised Biography by Charles White, which is to all intents and purposes Richard’s autobiography, as much of the text is in his own words. A warning for those who might be considering buying this though — it contains descriptions of his abuse as a child, and is also full of internalised homo- bi- and trans-phobia. This collection contains everything Richard recorded before 1962, from his early blues singles through to his gospel albums from after he temporarily gave up rock and roll for the church. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There are a handful of musicians in the history of rock music who seem like true originals. You can always trace their influences, of course, but when you come across one of them, no matter how clearly you can see who they were copying and who they were inspired by, you still just respond to them as something new under the sun. And of all the classic musicians of rock and roll, probably nobody epitomises that more than Little Richard. Nobody before him sounded like he did, and while many later tried — everyone from Captain Beefheart to Paul McCartney — nobody ever quite sounded like him later. And there are good reasons for that, because Little Richard was — and still is — someone who is quite unlike anyone else. [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Tutti Frutti”, just the opening phrase] This episode will be the first time we see queer culture becoming a major part of the rock and roll story — we’ve dealt with possibly-LGBT people before, of course, with Big Mama Thornton and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and with Johnny Ray in the Patreon-only episode about him, but this is the first time that an expression of sexuality has become part and parcel of the music itself, to the extent that we have to discuss it. And here, again, I have to point out that I am going to get things very wrong when I’m talking about Little Richard. I am a cis straight white man in Britain in the twenty-first century. Little Richard is a queer black man from the USA, and we’re talking about the middle of the twentieth century. I’m fairly familiar with current British LGBT+ culture, but even that is as an outsider. I am trying, always, to be completely fair and to never say anything that harms a marginalised group, but if I do so inadvertantly, I apologise. When I say he’s queer, I’m using the word not in its sense as a slur, but in the sense of an umbrella term for someone whose sexuality and gender identity are too complex to reduce to a single label, because he has at various times defined himself as gay, but he has also had relationships with women, and because from reading his autobiography there are so many passages where he talks about wishing he had been born a woman that it may well be that had he been born fifty years later he would have defined himself as a bisexual trans woman rather than a gay man. I will still, though, use “he” and “him” pronouns for him in this and future episodes, because those are the pronouns he uses himself. Here we’re again going to see something we saw with Rosetta Tharpe, but on a much grander scale — the pull between the secular and the divine. You see, as well as being some variety of queer, Little Richard is also a very, very, religious man, and a believer in a specific variety of fundamentalist Christianity that believes that any kind of sexuality or gender identity other than monogamous cis heterosexual is evil and sinful and the work of the Devil. He believes this very deeply and has at many times tried to live his life by this, and does so now. I, to put it as mildly as possible, disagree. But to understand the man and his music at all, you have to at least understand that this is the case. He has swung wildly between being almost the literal embodiment of the phrase “sex and drugs and rock and roll” and being a preacher who claims that homosexuality, bisexuality, and being trans are all works of the literal Devil — several times he’s gone from one to the other. As of 2017, and the last public interview I’ve seen with him, he has once again renounced rock and roll and same-sex relationships. I hope that he’s happy in his current situation. But at the time we’re talking about, he was a young person, and very much engaged in those things. [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Tutti Frutti”, just the opening phrase] Richard Penniman was the third of twelve children, born to parents who had met at a Pentecostal holiness meeting when they were thirteen and married when they were fourteen. Of all the children, Richard was the one who was most likely to cause trouble. He had a habit of playing practical jokes involving his own faeces — wrapping them up and giving them as presents to old ladies, or putting them in jars in the pantry for his mother to find. But he was also bullied terribly as a child, because he was disabled. One of his legs was significantly shorter than the other, his head was disproportionately large, and his eyes were different sizes. He was also subjected to homophobic abuse from a very early age, because the gait with which he walked because of his legs was vaguely mincing. At the age of fourteen, he decided to leave school and become a performer. He started out by touring with a snake-oil salesman. Snake oil is a traditional Chinese medicine, about which there have been claims made for centuries, and those claims might well be true. But snake oil in the US was usually a mixture of turpentine, tallow, camphor, and capsaicin. It wasn’t much different to Vicks’ VaporRub and similar substances, but it was sold as a cure-all for serious illnesses. Snake-oil salesmen would travel from town to town selling their placebo, and they would have entertainers performing with them in order to draw crowds. The young Richard Penniman travelled with “Doc Hudson”, and would sing the one non-religious song he knew, “Caldonia” by Louis Jordan: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Caldonia”] The yelps and hiccups in Jordan’s vocals on that song would become a massive part of Richard’s own vocal style. Richard soon left the medicine show, and started touring with a band, B. Brown and his orchestra, and it was while he was touring with that band that he grew his hair into the huge pompadour that would later become a trademark, and he also got the name “Little Richard”. However, all the musicians in the band were older than him, so he moved on again to another touring show, and another, and another. In many of these shows, he would perform as a female impersonator, which started when one of the women in one of the shows took sick and Richard had to quickly cover for her by putting on her costume, but soon he was performing in shows that were mostly drag acts, performing to a largely gay crowd. It was while he was performing in these shows that he met the first of his two biggest influences. Billy Wright, like Richard, had been a female impersonator for a while too. Like Richard, he had a pompadour haircut, and he was a fairly major blues star in the period from 1949 through 1951, being one of the first blues singers to sing with gospel-inspired mannerisms: [Excerpt: Billy Wright, “Married Woman’s Boogie”] 5) Richard became something of a Billy Wright wannabe, and started incorporating parts of Wright’s style into his performances. He also learned that Wright was using makeup on stage — Pancake 31 — and started applying that same makeup to his own skin, something he would continue to do throughout his performing career. Wright introduced Richard to Zenas Sears, who was one of the many white DJs all across America who were starting to become successful by playing black music and speaking in approximations of African-American Vernacular English — people like Alan Freed and Dewey Phillips. Sears had connections with RCA Records, and impressed by Richard’s talent, he got them to sign him. Richard’s first single was called “Every Hour”, and was very much a Billy Wright imitation: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Every Hour”] It was so close to Wright’s style, in fact, that Wright soon recorded his own knock-off of Richard’s song, “Every Evening”. [Excerpt: Billy Wright, “Every Evening”] At this point Richard was solely a singer — he hadn’t yet started to play an instrument to accompany himself. That changed when he met Esquerita. Esquerita was apparently born Stephen Quincey Reeder, but he was known to everyone as “Eskew” Reeder, after his initials, and that then became Esquerita, partly as a pun on the word “excreta”. Esquerita was another gay black R&B singer with a massive pompadour and a moustache. If Little Richard at this stage looked like a caricature of Billy Wright, Esquerita looked like a caricature of Little Richard. His hair was even bigger, he was even more flamboyant, and when he sang, he screamed even louder. And Esquerita also played the piano. Richard — who has never been unwilling to acknowledge the immense debt he owed to his inspirations — has said for years that Esquerita was the person who taught him how to play the piano, and that not only was his piano-playing style a copy of Esquerita’s, Esquerita was better. It’s hard to tell for sure exactly how much influence Esquerita actually had on Richard’s piano playing, because Esquerita himself didn’t make any records until after Richard did, at which point he was signed to his own record deal to be basically a Little Richard clone, but the records he did make certainly show a remarkable resemblance to Richard’s later style: [Excerpt: Esquerita: “Believe Me When I Say Rock And Roll Is Here To Stay”] Richard soon learned to play piano, and he was seen by Johnny Otis, who was impressed. Otis said: “I see this outrageous person, good-looking and very effeminate, with a big pompadour. He started singing and he was so good. I loved it. He reminded me of Dinah Washington. He did a few things, then he got on the floor. I think he even did a split, though I could be wrong about that. I remember it as being just beautiful, bizarre, and exotic, and when he got through he remarked, “This is Little Richard, King of the Blues,” and then he added, “And the Queen, too!” I knew I liked him then.” Otis recommended Richard to Don Robey, of Peacock Records, and Robey signed Richard and his band the Tempo Toppers. In early 1953, with none of his recordings for RCA having done anything, Little Richard and the Tempo Toppers went into the studio with another group, the Deuces of Rhythm, to record four tracks, issued as two singles: [Excerpt: Little Richard and the Tempo Toppers with the Deuces of Rhythm: “Ain’t That Good News”] None of these singles had any success, and Richard was *not* getting on very well at all with Don Robey. Robey was not the most respectful of people, and Richard let everyone know how badly he thought Robey treated his artists. Robey responded by beating Richard up so badly that he got a hernia which hurt for years and necessitated an operation. Richard would record one more session for Peacock, at the end of the year, when Don Robey gave him to Johnny Otis to handle. Otis took his own band into the studio with Richard, and the four songs they recorded at that session went unreleased at the time, but included a version of “Directly From My Heart To You”, a song Richard would soon rerecord, and another song called “Little Richard’s Boogie”: [Excerpt: Little Richard with Johnny Otis and his Orchestra, “Little Richard’s Boogie”] Nobody was very happy with the recordings, and Richard was dropped by Peacock. He was also, around the same time, made to move away from Macon, Georgia, where he lived, after being arrested for “lewd conduct” — what amounted to consensual voyeurism. And the Tempo Toppers had split up. Richard had been dumped by two record labels, his father had died recently, he had no band, and he wasn’t allowed to live in his home town any more. Things seemed pretty low. But before he’d moved away, Richard had met Lloyd Price, and Price had suggested that Richard send a demo tape in to Specialty Records, Price’s label. The tape lay unlistened at Specialty for months, and it was only because of Richard’s constant pestering for them to listen to it that Bumps Blackwell, who was then in charge of A&R at Specialty, eventually got round to listening to it. This was an enormous piece of good fortune, in a way that neither of them fully realised at the time. Blackwell had been a longtime friend and colleague of Ray Charles. When Charles’ gospel-influenced new sound had started making waves on the charts, Art Rupe, Specialty’s owner, had asked Blackwell to find him a gospel-sounding R&B singer of his own to compete with Ray Charles. Blackwell listened to the tape, which contained two songs, one of which was an early version of “Wonderin'”, and he could tell this was someone with as much gospel in his voice as Ray Charles had: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Wonderin'”] Blackwell and Rupe made an agreement with Don Robey to buy out his contract for six hundred dollars — one gets the impression that Robey would have paid *them* six hundred dollars to get rid of Richard had they asked him. They knew that Richard liked the music of Fats Domino, and so they decided to hold their first session at Cosimo Matassa’s studio, where Domino recorded, and with the same session musicians that Domino used. Blackwell also brought in two great New Orleans piano players, Huey “Piano” Smith and James Booker, both of whom were players in the same style as Domino. You can hear Smith, for example, on his hit “The Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie-Woogie Flu” from a couple of years later: [Excerpt: Huey “Piano” Smith, “The Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie-Woogie Flu”] All of these people were veterans of sessions either for Domino or for artists who had worked in Domino’s style, like Lloyd Price or Smiley Lewis. The only difference here was that it would be Bumps Blackwell who did the arrangement and production, rather than Dave Bartholomew like on Domino’s records. However, the session didn’t go well at all. Blackwell had heard that Richard was an astounding live act, but he was just doing nothing in the studio. As Blackwell later put it “If you look like Tarzan and sound like Mickey Mouse it just doesn’t work out.” They did record some usable material — “Wonderin'”, which we heard before, came out OK, and they recorded “I’m Just a Lonely, Lonely, Guy” by a young songwriter called Dorothy LaBostrie, which seemed to go OK. They also cut a decent version of “Directly From My Heart to You”, a song which Richard had previously recorded with Johnny Otis: [Excerpt: Little RIchard, “Directly From My Heart to You”] So they had a couple of usable songs, but usable was about all you could say for them. They didn’t have anything that would make an impact, nothing that would live up to Richard’s potential. So Blackwell called a break, and they headed off to get themselves something to eat, at the Dew Drop Inn. And something happened there that would change Little RIchard’s career forever. The Dew Drop Inn had a piano, and it had an audience that Little Richard could show off in front of. He went over to the piano, started hammering the keys, and screamed out: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Tutti Frutti”, just the opening phrase] On hearing Richard sing the song he performed then, Bumps Blackwell knew two things pretty much instantly. The first was that that song would definitely be a hit if he could get it released. And the second was that there was no way on Earth that he could possibly put it out. “Tutti Frutti” started as a song that Richard sang more or less as a joke. There is a whole undercurrent of R&B in the fifties which has very, very, sexually explicit lyrics, and I wish I was able to play some of those songs on this podcast without getting it dumped into the adult-only section on iTunes, because some of them are wonderful, and others are hilarious. “Tutti Frutti” in its original form was part of this undercurrent, and had lyrics that were clearly not broadcastable — “A wop bop a loo mop, a good goddam/Tutti Frutti, good booty/If it don’t fit, don’t force it, you can grease it, make it easy”. But Bumps Blackwell thought that there was *something* that could be made into a hit there. Handily, they had a songwriter on hand. Dorothy LaBostrie was a young woman he knew who had been trying to write songs, but who didn’t understand that songs had to have different melodies — all her lyrics were written to the melody of the same song, Dinah Washington’s “Blowtop Blues”: [Excerpt: Dinah Washington, “Blowtop Blues”] But her lyrics had showed promise, and so Blackwell had agreed to record one of her songs, “I’m Just a Lonely Lonely Guy”, with Richard. LaBostrie had been hanging round the studio to see how her song sounded when it was recorded, so Blackwell asked her to do a last-minute rewrite on “Tutti Frutti”, in the hope of getting something salvageable out of what had been a depressing session. But there was still a problem — Richard, not normally a man overly known for his modesty, became embarrassed at singing his song to the young woman. Blackwell explained to him that he really didn’t have much choice, and Richard eventually agreed to sing it to her — but only if he was turned to face the wall, so he couldn’t see this innocent-looking young woman’s face. (I should note here that both Richard and LaBostrie have told different stories about this over the years — both have claimed on several occasions that they were the sole author of the song and that the other didn’t deserve any credit at all. But this is the story as it was told by others who were there.) LaBostrie’s new lyrics were rudimentary at best. “I got a girl named Sue, she knows just what to do”. But they fit the metre, they weren’t about anal sex, and so they were going to be the new lyrics. The session was running late at this point, and when LaBostrie had the lyrics finished there was only fifteen minutes to go. It didn’t matter that the lyrics were trite. What mattered was that they got a track cut to salvage the session. Blackwell didn’t have time to teach the piano players the song, so he got Richard to play the piano himself. They cut the finished track in three takes, and Blackwell went back to California happy he at last had a hit: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Tutti Frutti”] “Tutti Frutti” was, indeed, a massive hit. It went to number twenty-one on the pop charts. But… you know what comes next. There was an inept white cover version, this time by Pat Boone. [excerpt: Pat Boone, “Tutti Frutti”] Now, notice that there, Boone changes the lyrics. In Richard’s version, after all, he seems interested in both Sue and Daisy. A good Christian boy like Pat Boone couldn’t be heard singing about such immorality. That one-line change (and a couple of other spot changes to individual words to make things into full sentences) seems to be why a songwriter called Joe Lubin is also credited for the song. Getting a third of a song like “Tutti Frutti” for that little work sounds like a pretty good deal, at least for Lubin, if not for Richard. Another way in which Richard got less than he deserved was that the publishing was owned by a company owned by Art Rupe. That company licensed the song to Specialty Records for half the normal mechanical licensing rate — normally a publishing company would charge two cents per record pressed for their songs, but instead Specialty only had to pay one cent. This sort of cross-collateralisation was common with independent labels at the time, but it still rankled to Richard when he figured it out. Not that he was thinking about contracts at all at this point. He was becoming a huge star, and that meant he had to *break* a lot of contracts. He’d got concert bookings for several months ahead, but those bookings were in second-rate clubs, and he had to be in Hollywood to promote his new record and build a new career. But he also didn’t want to get a reputation for missing gigs. There was only one thing to do — hire an impostor to be Little Richard at these low-class gigs. So while Richard went off to promote his record, another young singer from Georgia with a pompadour and a gospel feel was being introduced with the phrase “Ladies and gentlemen—the hardest-working man in showbusiness today—Little Richard!” When James Brown went back to performing under his own name, he kept that introduction… Meanwhile, Richard was working on his second hit record. He and Blackwell decided that this record should be louder, faster, and more raucous than “Tutti Frutti” had been. If Pat Boone wanted to cover this one, he’d have to work a lot harder than he had previously. The basis for “Long Tall Sally” came from a scrap of lyric written by a teenage girl. Enotris Johnson had written a single verse of lyric on a scrap of paper, and had walked many miles to New Orleans to show the lyric to a DJ named Honey Chile. (Bumps Blackwell describes her as having walked from Opelousas, Mississippi, but there’s no such place — Johnson appears to have lived in Bogalusa, Louisiana). Johnson wanted to make enough money to pay for hospital for her sick aunt — the “Aunt Mary” in the song, and thought that Little Richard might sing the song and get her the money. What she had was only a few lines, but Honey Chile had taken Johnson on as a charity project, and Blackwell didn’t want to disappoint such an influential figure, so he and Richard hammered something together: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Long Tall Sally”] The song, about a “John” who “jumps back in the alley” when he sees his wife coming while he’s engaged in activities of an unspecified nature with “Sally”, who is long, tall, and bald, once again stays just on the broadcastable side of the line, while implying sex of a non-heteronormative variety, possibly with a sex worker. Despite this, and despite the attempts to make the song uncoverably raucous, Pat Boone still sold a million copies with his cover version: [Excerpt: Pat Boone, “Long Tall Sally”] So Little Richard had managed to get that good clean-cut wholesome Christian white boy Pat Boone singing songs which gave him a lot more to worry about than whether he was singing “Ain’t” rather than “Isn’t”. But he was also becoming a big star himself — and he was getting an ego to go along with it. And he was starting to worry whether he should be making this devil music at all. When we next look at Little Richard, we’ll see just how the combination of self-doubt and ego led to his greatest successes and to the collapse of his career.  

Episode thirty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Tutti Frutti” by Little Richard, and at the rather more family-unfriendly subject the song was originally about. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (Apologies that this one is a day late — health problems kept me from getting the edit finished). Also, a reminder for those who didn’t see the previous post — my patreon backers are now getting ten-minute mini-episodes every week, and the first one is up, and I guested on Jaffa Cake Jukebox this week, talking about the UK top twenty for January 18 1957. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of the information used here comes from The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Authorised Biography by Charles White, which is to all intents and purposes Richard’s autobiography, as much of the text is in his own words. A warning for those who might be considering buying this though — it contains descriptions of his abuse as a child, and is also full of internalised homo- bi- and trans-phobia. This collection contains everything Richard recorded before 1962, from his early blues singles through to his gospel albums from after he temporarily gave up rock and roll for the church. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There are a handful of musicians in the history of rock music who seem like true originals. You can always trace their influences, of course, but when you come across one of them, no matter how clearly you can see who they were copying and who they were inspired by, you still just respond to them as something new under the sun. And of all the classic musicians of rock and roll, probably nobody epitomises that more than Little Richard. Nobody before him sounded like he did, and while many later tried — everyone from Captain Beefheart to Paul McCartney — nobody ever quite sounded like him later. And there are good reasons for that, because Little Richard was — and still is — someone who is quite unlike anyone else. [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Tutti Frutti”, just the opening phrase] This episode will be the first time we see queer culture becoming a major part of the rock and roll story — we’ve dealt with possibly-LGBT people before, of course, with Big Mama Thornton and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and with Johnny Ray in the Patreon-only episode about him, but this is the first time that an expression of sexuality has become part and parcel of the music itself, to the extent that we have to discuss it. And here, again, I have to point out that I am going to get things very wrong when I’m talking about Little Richard. I am a cis straight white man in Britain in the twenty-first century. Little Richard is a queer black man from the USA, and we’re talking about the middle of the twentieth century. I’m fairly familiar with current British LGBT+ culture, but even that is as an outsider. I am trying, always, to be completely fair and to never say anything that harms a marginalised group, but if I do so inadvertantly, I apologise. When I say he’s queer, I’m using the word not in its sense as a slur, but in the sense of an umbrella term for someone whose sexuality and gender identity are too complex to reduce to a single label, because he has at various times defined himself as gay, but he has also had relationships with women, and because from reading his autobiography there are so many passages where he talks about wishing he had been born a woman that it may well be that had he been born fifty years later he would have defined himself as a bisexual trans woman rather than a gay man. I will still, though, use “he” and “him” pronouns for him in this and future episodes, because those are the pronouns he uses himself. Here we’re again going to see something we saw with Rosetta Tharpe, but on a much grander scale — the pull between the secular and the divine. You see, as well as being some variety of queer, Little Richard is also a very, very, religious man, and a believer in a specific variety of fundamentalist Christianity that believes that any kind of sexuality or gender identity other than monogamous cis heterosexual is evil and sinful and the work of the Devil. He believes this very deeply and has at many times tried to live his life by this, and does so now. I, to put it as mildly as possible, disagree. But to understand the man and his music at all, you have to at least understand that this is the case. He has swung wildly between being almost the literal embodiment of the phrase “sex and drugs and rock and roll” and being a preacher who claims that homosexuality, bisexuality, and being trans are all works of the literal Devil — several times he’s gone from one to the other. As of 2017, and the last public interview I’ve seen with him, he has once again renounced rock and roll and same-sex relationships. I hope that he’s happy in his current situation. But at the time we’re talking about, he was a young person, and very much engaged in those things. [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Tutti Frutti”, just the opening phrase] Richard Penniman was the third of twelve children, born to parents who had met at a Pentecostal holiness meeting when they were thirteen and married when they were fourteen. Of all the children, Richard was the one who was most likely to cause trouble. He had a habit of playing practical jokes involving his own faeces — wrapping them up and giving them as presents to old ladies, or putting them in jars in the pantry for his mother to find. But he was also bullied terribly as a child, because he was disabled. One of his legs was significantly shorter than the other, his head was disproportionately large, and his eyes were different sizes. He was also subjected to homophobic abuse from a very early age, because the gait with which he walked because of his legs was vaguely mincing. At the age of fourteen, he decided to leave school and become a performer. He started out by touring with a snake-oil salesman. Snake oil is a traditional Chinese medicine, about which there have been claims made for centuries, and those claims might well be true. But snake oil in the US was usually a mixture of turpentine, tallow, camphor, and capsaicin. It wasn’t much different to Vicks’ VaporRub and similar substances, but it was sold as a cure-all for serious illnesses. Snake-oil salesmen would travel from town to town selling their placebo, and they would have entertainers performing with them in order to draw crowds. The young Richard Penniman travelled with “Doc Hudson”, and would sing the one non-religious song he knew, “Caldonia” by Louis Jordan: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Caldonia”] The yelps and hiccups in Jordan’s vocals on that song would become a massive part of Richard’s own vocal style. Richard soon left the medicine show, and started touring with a band, B. Brown and his orchestra, and it was while he was touring with that band that he grew his hair into the huge pompadour that would later become a trademark, and he also got the name “Little Richard”. However, all the musicians in the band were older than him, so he moved on again to another touring show, and another, and another. In many of these shows, he would perform as a female impersonator, which started when one of the women in one of the shows took sick and Richard had to quickly cover for her by putting on her costume, but soon he was performing in shows that were mostly drag acts, performing to a largely gay crowd. It was while he was performing in these shows that he met the first of his two biggest influences. Billy Wright, like Richard, had been a female impersonator for a while too. Like Richard, he had a pompadour haircut, and he was a fairly major blues star in the period from 1949 through 1951, being one of the first blues singers to sing with gospel-inspired mannerisms: [Excerpt: Billy Wright, “Married Woman’s Boogie”] 5) Richard became something of a Billy Wright wannabe, and started incorporating parts of Wright’s style into his performances. He also learned that Wright was using makeup on stage — Pancake 31 — and started applying that same makeup to his own skin, something he would continue to do throughout his performing career. Wright introduced Richard to Zenas Sears, who was one of the many white DJs all across America who were starting to become successful by playing black music and speaking in approximations of African-American Vernacular English — people like Alan Freed and Dewey Phillips. Sears had connections with RCA Records, and impressed by Richard’s talent, he got them to sign him. Richard’s first single was called “Every Hour”, and was very much a Billy Wright imitation: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Every Hour”] It was so close to Wright’s style, in fact, that Wright soon recorded his own knock-off of Richard’s song, “Every Evening”. [Excerpt: Billy Wright, “Every Evening”] At this point Richard was solely a singer — he hadn’t yet started to play an instrument to accompany himself. That changed when he met Esquerita. Esquerita was apparently born Stephen Quincey Reeder, but he was known to everyone as “Eskew” Reeder, after his initials, and that then became Esquerita, partly as a pun on the word “excreta”. Esquerita was another gay black R&B singer with a massive pompadour and a moustache. If Little Richard at this stage looked like a caricature of Billy Wright, Esquerita looked like a caricature of Little Richard. His hair was even bigger, he was even more flamboyant, and when he sang, he screamed even louder. And Esquerita also played the piano. Richard — who has never been unwilling to acknowledge the immense debt he owed to his inspirations — has said for years that Esquerita was the person who taught him how to play the piano, and that not only was his piano-playing style a copy of Esquerita’s, Esquerita was better. It’s hard to tell for sure exactly how much influence Esquerita actually had on Richard’s piano playing, because Esquerita himself didn’t make any records until after Richard did, at which point he was signed to his own record deal to be basically a Little Richard clone, but the records he did make certainly show a remarkable resemblance to Richard’s later style: [Excerpt: Esquerita: “Believe Me When I Say Rock And Roll Is Here To Stay”] Richard soon learned to play piano, and he was seen by Johnny Otis, who was impressed. Otis said: “I see this outrageous person, good-looking and very effeminate, with a big pompadour. He started singing and he was so good. I loved it. He reminded me of Dinah Washington. He did a few things, then he got on the floor. I think he even did a split, though I could be wrong about that. I remember it as being just beautiful, bizarre, and exotic, and when he got through he remarked, “This is Little Richard, King of the Blues,” and then he added, “And the Queen, too!” I knew I liked him then.” Otis recommended Richard to Don Robey, of Peacock Records, and Robey signed Richard and his band the Tempo Toppers. In early 1953, with none of his recordings for RCA having done anything, Little Richard and the Tempo Toppers went into the studio with another group, the Deuces of Rhythm, to record four tracks, issued as two singles: [Excerpt: Little Richard and the Tempo Toppers with the Deuces of Rhythm: “Ain’t That Good News”] None of these singles had any success, and Richard was *not* getting on very well at all with Don Robey. Robey was not the most respectful of people, and Richard let everyone know how badly he thought Robey treated his artists. Robey responded by beating Richard up so badly that he got a hernia which hurt for years and necessitated an operation. Richard would record one more session for Peacock, at the end of the year, when Don Robey gave him to Johnny Otis to handle. Otis took his own band into the studio with Richard, and the four songs they recorded at that session went unreleased at the time, but included a version of “Directly From My Heart To You”, a song Richard would soon rerecord, and another song called “Little Richard’s Boogie”: [Excerpt: Little Richard with Johnny Otis and his Orchestra, “Little Richard’s Boogie”] Nobody was very happy with the recordings, and Richard was dropped by Peacock. He was also, around the same time, made to move away from Macon, Georgia, where he lived, after being arrested for “lewd conduct” — what amounted to consensual voyeurism. And the Tempo Toppers had split up. Richard had been dumped by two record labels, his father had died recently, he had no band, and he wasn’t allowed to live in his home town any more. Things seemed pretty low. But before he’d moved away, Richard had met Lloyd Price, and Price had suggested that Richard send a demo tape in to Specialty Records, Price’s label. The tape lay unlistened at Specialty for months, and it was only because of Richard’s constant pestering for them to listen to it that Bumps Blackwell, who was then in charge of A&R at Specialty, eventually got round to listening to it. This was an enormous piece of good fortune, in a way that neither of them fully realised at the time. Blackwell had been a longtime friend and colleague of Ray Charles. When Charles’ gospel-influenced new sound had started making waves on the charts, Art Rupe, Specialty’s owner, had asked Blackwell to find him a gospel-sounding R&B singer of his own to compete with Ray Charles. Blackwell listened to the tape, which contained two songs, one of which was an early version of “Wonderin'”, and he could tell this was someone with as much gospel in his voice as Ray Charles had: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Wonderin'”] Blackwell and Rupe made an agreement with Don Robey to buy out his contract for six hundred dollars — one gets the impression that Robey would have paid *them* six hundred dollars to get rid of Richard had they asked him. They knew that Richard liked the music of Fats Domino, and so they decided to hold their first session at Cosimo Matassa’s studio, where Domino recorded, and with the same session musicians that Domino used. Blackwell also brought in two great New Orleans piano players, Huey “Piano” Smith and James Booker, both of whom were players in the same style as Domino. You can hear Smith, for example, on his hit “The Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie-Woogie Flu” from a couple of years later: [Excerpt: Huey “Piano” Smith, “The Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie-Woogie Flu”] All of these people were veterans of sessions either for Domino or for artists who had worked in Domino’s style, like Lloyd Price or Smiley Lewis. The only difference here was that it would be Bumps Blackwell who did the arrangement and production, rather than Dave Bartholomew like on Domino’s records. However, the session didn’t go well at all. Blackwell had heard that Richard was an astounding live act, but he was just doing nothing in the studio. As Blackwell later put it “If you look like Tarzan and sound like Mickey Mouse it just doesn’t work out.” They did record some usable material — “Wonderin'”, which we heard before, came out OK, and they recorded “I’m Just a Lonely, Lonely, Guy” by a young songwriter called Dorothy LaBostrie, which seemed to go OK. They also cut a decent version of “Directly From My Heart to You”, a song which Richard had previously recorded with Johnny Otis: [Excerpt: Little RIchard, “Directly From My Heart to You”] So they had a couple of usable songs, but usable was about all you could say for them. They didn’t have anything that would make an impact, nothing that would live up to Richard’s potential. So Blackwell called a break, and they headed off to get themselves something to eat, at the Dew Drop Inn. And something happened there that would change Little RIchard’s career forever. The Dew Drop Inn had a piano, and it had an audience that Little Richard could show off in front of. He went over to the piano, started hammering the keys, and screamed out: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Tutti Frutti”, just the opening phrase] On hearing Richard sing the song he performed then, Bumps Blackwell knew two things pretty much instantly. The first was that that song would definitely be a hit if he could get it released. And the second was that there was no way on Earth that he could possibly put it out. “Tutti Frutti” started as a song that Richard sang more or less as a joke. There is a whole undercurrent of R&B in the fifties which has very, very, sexually explicit lyrics, and I wish I was able to play some of those songs on this podcast without getting it dumped into the adult-only section on iTunes, because some of them are wonderful, and others are hilarious. “Tutti Frutti” in its original form was part of this undercurrent, and had lyrics that were clearly not broadcastable — “A wop bop a loo mop, a good goddam/Tutti Frutti, good booty/If it don’t fit, don’t force it, you can grease it, make it easy”. But Bumps Blackwell thought that there was *something* that could be made into a hit there. Handily, they had a songwriter on hand. Dorothy LaBostrie was a young woman he knew who had been trying to write songs, but who didn’t understand that songs had to have different melodies — all her lyrics were written to the melody of the same song, Dinah Washington’s “Blowtop Blues”: [Excerpt: Dinah Washington, “Blowtop Blues”] But her lyrics had showed promise, and so Blackwell had agreed to record one of her songs, “I’m Just a Lonely Lonely Guy”, with Richard. LaBostrie had been hanging round the studio to see how her song sounded when it was recorded, so Blackwell asked her to do a last-minute rewrite on “Tutti Frutti”, in the hope of getting something salvageable out of what had been a depressing session. But there was still a problem — Richard, not normally a man overly known for his modesty, became embarrassed at singing his song to the young woman. Blackwell explained to him that he really didn’t have much choice, and Richard eventually agreed to sing it to her — but only if he was turned to face the wall, so he couldn’t see this innocent-looking young woman’s face. (I should note here that both Richard and LaBostrie have told different stories about this over the years — both have claimed on several occasions that they were the sole author of the song and that the other didn’t deserve any credit at all. But this is the story as it was told by others who were there.) LaBostrie’s new lyrics were rudimentary at best. “I got a girl named Sue, she knows just what to do”. But they fit the metre, they weren’t about anal sex, and so they were going to be the new lyrics. The session was running late at this point, and when LaBostrie had the lyrics finished there was only fifteen minutes to go. It didn’t matter that the lyrics were trite. What mattered was that they got a track cut to salvage the session. Blackwell didn’t have time to teach the piano players the song, so he got Richard to play the piano himself. They cut the finished track in three takes, and Blackwell went back to California happy he at last had a hit: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Tutti Frutti”] “Tutti Frutti” was, indeed, a massive hit. It went to number twenty-one on the pop charts. But… you know what comes next. There was an inept white cover version, this time by Pat Boone. [excerpt: Pat Boone, “Tutti Frutti”] Now, notice that there, Boone changes the lyrics. In Richard’s version, after all, he seems interested in both Sue and Daisy. A good Christian boy like Pat Boone couldn’t be heard singing about such immorality. That one-line change (and a couple of other spot changes to individual words to make things into full sentences) seems to be why a songwriter called Joe Lubin is also credited for the song. Getting a third of a song like “Tutti Frutti” for that little work sounds like a pretty good deal, at least for Lubin, if not for Richard. Another way in which Richard got less than he deserved was that the publishing was owned by a company owned by Art Rupe. That company licensed the song to Specialty Records for half the normal mechanical licensing rate — normally a publishing company would charge two cents per record pressed for their songs, but instead Specialty only had to pay one cent. This sort of cross-collateralisation was common with independent labels at the time, but it still rankled to Richard when he figured it out. Not that he was thinking about contracts at all at this point. He was becoming a huge star, and that meant he had to *break* a lot of contracts. He’d got concert bookings for several months ahead, but those bookings were in second-rate clubs, and he had to be in Hollywood to promote his new record and build a new career. But he also didn’t want to get a reputation for missing gigs. There was only one thing to do — hire an impostor to be Little Richard at these low-class gigs. So while Richard went off to promote his record, another young singer from Georgia with a pompadour and a gospel feel was being introduced with the phrase “Ladies and gentlemen—the hardest-working man in showbusiness today—Little Richard!” When James Brown went back to performing under his own name, he kept that introduction… Meanwhile, Richard was working on his second hit record. He and Blackwell decided that this record should be louder, faster, and more raucous than “Tutti Frutti” had been. If Pat Boone wanted to cover this one, he’d have to work a lot harder than he had previously. The basis for “Long Tall Sally” came from a scrap of lyric written by a teenage girl. Enotris Johnson had written a single verse of lyric on a scrap of paper, and had walked many miles to New Orleans to show the lyric to a DJ named Honey Chile. (Bumps Blackwell describes her as having walked from Opelousas, Mississippi, but there’s no such place — Johnson appears to have lived in Bogalusa, Louisiana). Johnson wanted to make enough money to pay for hospital for her sick aunt — the “Aunt Mary” in the song, and thought that Little Richard might sing the song and get her the money. What she had was only a few lines, but Honey Chile had taken Johnson on as a charity project, and Blackwell didn’t want to disappoint such an influential figure, so he and Richard hammered something together: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Long Tall Sally”] The song, about a “John” who “jumps back in the alley” when he sees his wife coming while he’s engaged in activities of an unspecified nature with “Sally”, who is long, tall, and bald, once again stays just on the broadcastable side of the line, while implying sex of a non-heteronormative variety, possibly with a sex worker. Despite this, and despite the attempts to make the song uncoverably raucous, Pat Boone still sold a million copies with his cover version: [Excerpt: Pat Boone, “Long Tall Sally”] So Little Richard had managed to get that good clean-cut wholesome Christian white boy Pat Boone singing songs which gave him a lot more to worry about than whether he was singing “Ain’t” rather than “Isn’t”. But he was also becoming a big star himself — and he was getting an ego to go along with it. And he was starting to worry whether he should be making this devil music at all. When we next look at Little Richard, we’ll see just how the combination of self-doubt and ego led to his greatest successes and to the collapse of his career.  

Charles Bonfiglio is the president and CEO of Tint World®, an award-winning franchised provider of automotive, residential, commercial and marine window tinting and security film services. With Automotive Styling Centers™ in the U.S. and abroad, each location houses profit centers, ranging from in-store accessory installations, to off-site sales and installation of residential, commercial and marine window tinting and security films.   Key Takeaways: [0:18] Today’s episode of Franchise Euphoria is brought to you by IndyFranchiseLaw.com, a leading resource in the franchise space. Head over to IndyFranchiseLaw.com learn more! [0:59] Josh introduces today’s guest, Charles Bonfiglio, the president and CEO of Tint World. [1:58] Josh welcomes Charles to Franchise Euphoria. [2:21] Charles starts the interview by telling the audience about Tint World, which is an automotive after-market accessories and styling company and how he got involved with the business. [6:34] Charles made the decision to purchase the real estate tied to his Meineke locations which Josh points out is a great way to preserve a secondary asset in case something goes wrong with the franchise. [8:47] Over the years, Charles owned several Meineke franchises and sold them over the course of a few decades. He sold his last location when Tint World had about 30 locations in 2014. [9:52] Charles was actually not the creator of the Tint World franchise. When he first moved to Florida, somebody had already created the concept, and while he anticipated they would be a competitor at some point, he ended up partnering up with him to franchise. [11:51] Tint World became a franchise in 2007. As of today, they have 71 stores, several of which are outside of the US. [12:54] Tint World provides its franchisees with a system, a platform that will take care of heavy lifting, branding, marketing, support, among a plethora of other things. [14:38] When Charles was making the Tint World franchise, he crafted it with all the features he would want himself if he was a franchisee. These benefits maximize the potential for franchisee success. [16:18] Tint World just released an e-commerce platform where franchisees can sell their products online. [18:41] Charles finds that having the “franchisee mentality” is the best way to run a franchise system; equipping them with the right tools and support is key for success. [20:14] In addition to being someone who likes automobiles, a good Tint World franchisee is someone who likes working with customers and has the ability to maintain a growth mindset. [22:18] One of the biggest challenges Charles has faced as a franchisor has been setting and achieving goals for their average store sales and continually pushing the boundaries to get their sales even higher. [24:23] If you want to learn more about Tint World, visit www.TintWorld.com or you can find them on social media. [24:45] Thanks for listening, and please, reach out to Josh anytime through email at josh@franchiseeuphoria.com. If you enjoyed this interview, please leave us a review on iTunes.   Mentioned in This Episode: josh@franchiseeuphoria.com www.franchiseeuphoria.com www.indyfranchiselaw.com www.tintworld.com https://www.facebook.com/tintworld https://twitter.com/TintWorld https://www.linkedin.com/company/tint-world

The year was 1975….. Charles McCullar, a young man from Virginia, was traveling cross country to visit a friend in Eugene Oregon. Charles, a hobbyist photographer, spent his free time hiking and focusing on his craft. During his stay in Oregon, he planned a two-day hiking trip to Crater Lake National Park to photograph the parks winter scenes.  Reports claim Charles was ill prepared for the conditions he met on his arrival at the park. This did not deter Charles as he planned a two-day photography session. Once finished, Charles planned to return to his friend's house before heading back home. When Charles never returned, the search began.  In the year following his disappearance, a startling discovery was made by backcountry hikers deep in a desolate section of the park that creates more questions than answers.  Join us as we discuss what Charles experienced in the park and the mystery surrounding what park rangers uncovered. Learn about other unsolved missing persons cases in America's wilderness at Locations Unknown. Follow us on Facebook & Instagram.Become a Patron of the Locations Unknown Podcast by visiting our Patreon page.  

Charles Morgan is a lot of fun to be around and to learn from. He learned about business first from working with his father, starting when he was a little boy. As IBM’s top systems engineer for the entire state of Arkansas, Charles sold Sam Walton his first IBM System 360 Mainframe, which allowed Walmart to take off. He’s a pioneer of big data, having built one of the first companies in the industry, Acxiom Corp. And now, at a time when most of his contemporaries are retired, he’s having fun being a very hands-on CEO at First Orion, whose Privacy Star app is blocking literally billions of scam calls. But then, he has also driven the 24-hours at Daytona, and at most of the other major tracks around the U.S., too. He has the X-rays to show for it.   Key Takeaways: [:25] Ray Hoffman introduces the guest, Charles Morgan, First Orion CEO. [1:30] What shaped Charles and gave him the confidence to take on the risk that allows the reward in capitalism? Charles credits the DNA he inherited from his father and grandfather. He says a family history of starting businesses helps. He wasn’t afraid of entrepreneurism and worked in the family business. [2:32] Charles doesn’t think it was courage that drove him but just the understanding that entrepreneurism is what he ought to do. [2:39] Charles sees capitalism as the freedom to pursue your own talent and interests in a business sense that allows you to be all you can be for yourself, for your creative side, and for your family. That is also, for Charles, the essence of the joy of life. [3:09] Charles would not do well in a controlled environment with little or no self-direction. [3:30] Why is Charles, at age 76, still heavily involved as a CEO? He says his wife is pleased that she is free to do lunch with whomever she wants, as Charles is at work! [4:18] Charles is a geek at heart and loves problem-solving. His enjoyment in racing comes from the technical problem-solving of getting a car setup right. Charles has designed some race cars. [4:39] Charles likes people problem-solving and business problem-solving; coming up with a really good organizational strategy can be an exciting thing. Innovation, producing results for the customer, and putting the right person in charge of each area, are important for small companies like First Orion or large companies like Acxiom. [5:09] Business is and always has been a ‘people game.’ [5:12] Charles still loves technical problems. He is still programming prototype software for the solutions First Orion offers. Charles wakes up at 5:00 a.m. and goes to his computer to work on the current problem for an uninterrupted couple of hours. Then he goes to work at 9:00 a.m. [5:57] Charles says we all decide what to do with our lives. He believes retirement is the freedom to be able to get up every day and do what you love to do. Everybody’s job ought to be retirement every day, from the age of 21 on. [6:32] In Charles’s first book, Matters of Life and Data, he said his businessman father understood reward but not risk. His father had the vision for opportunities but did not understand how to make them happen —  how to get the right people doing the right things, and where to take the right risks. He didn’t achieve the level of focus he needed. [7:23] In his father’s hardware business, he diverged from hardware to wood doors and frames, aluminum windows, and plywood. He tried to be all things to all people. He didn’t have the discipline to decide how his business would grow and where he would get the resources to grow it. It was helter-skelter. [7:59] His father knew the reward he wanted was a successful business but he couldn’t organize it very well. [8:16] At age 17, at the direction of his father, Charles took a truck and drove his 15-year-old brother from Fort Smith to the Andersen Window factory in Philadelphia for Charles to pick up a load of windows and pitch to the Andersen brothers an improvement on their window design. His father had sent a letter to Andersen about it.[9:44] The Andersen brothers had a conference room prepared for them, with the company engineers ready to hear his presentation. Charles explained it to them and they were very interested to see if they could incorporate the idea into their windows. [10:12] That night, Charles and his brother headed on a train to New York City for two plays their father had bought tickets for them to see. They picked up the tickets at will-call. After two nights in New York, they took the train back to Philadelphia and drove back to Fort Smith with their window order. [10:52] In 1966, Charles started his first career job at IBM. He was made the top systems engineer for IBM for Arkansas. [10:59] In Charles’s book, What Now?, he recalls a lesson he learned early on from a senior IBM executive. He was told never to burn bridges with someone at work, whether it’s a poor employee or a bad boss. Respect them as human beings. Circumstances change and you may work together again. Decades later, that advice still serves. [12:05] Charles made his first investment in First Orion/ PrivacyStar when a representative presented it to him as a concept of putting software into the switching systems of telecoms’ networks to allow individual customers of the telecom to block numbers that they didn’t want to call them. [12:43] The obstacle ahead of them was that the telecoms weren’t interested in granting network access to outside software engineers. So that idea didn’t work. [12:56] The idea came at a time when Charles expected he would be leaving Acxiom and he was looking for something “to dabble with.” Charles moved to Dallas and invested in First Orion with $1 million with Jeff Stalnaker, the COO. At first, Charles was not expecting to become extremely involved with the investment. [13:44] Charles talks about how he left Acxiom, as the face of the company. He had been getting tired of the process of running a company of that size and new regulations, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, added to the burden. A large investor, Jeff Ubben, brought a proxy battle, then joined the board and started trying to oust Charles. [15:58] Charles was tired of the conflict. He invested in First Orion to get his mind off the struggle on the board at Acxiom. [16:24] Going into First Orion/ PrivacyStar, Charles didn’t keep in his mind how long it took and how difficult it was to build up Acxiom. But he did remember some of the things that didn’t work, so he was able to avoid some of the early mistakes. [17:27] As the most dominant company in the direct marketing industry, Acxiom got a little cocky at the influence they had. As CEO, Charles could call on executives at any level and knew all the senior guys at major corporations. His son tells him, “You were kind of a big deal!” [17:50] Charles wrote in his first book, “A good entrepreneur knows what he doesn’t know.” At the beginning of his involvement with First Orion, Charles didn’t know the telecom industry, nor did he know how little the man dragging him into it knew about the telecom industry; most of his claimed knowledge was actually stuff he’d made up. [18:28] Charles asked his friend, Bill Connor, to meet with the man from First Orion. The meeting didn’t happen until after Charles had put in the $1 million. Bill told him “Well, I hope you’re successful,” but didn’t say what he thought — that the man was a fraud — until Charles cut off the relationship with the man. [19:31] Charles wrote in his book that “We had no idea of the vastness, the complicatedness, the downright convolutedness of the systems that we were stepping into.” Charles says the networks pre-date IT. There is layer upon layer of technology that all has to work together. Somehow, phone calls get through. [20:25] First Orion has had to integrate their technology into those networks, thanks only to a bunch of amazing people. The systems, to this day, are very complicated. First Orion interrogates every single phone call to every user of T-Mobile today, to see all its characteristics, to try to figure out if it’s a scam call. It’s a complicated process. [21:19] Today, PrivacyStar is able to block or identify about 90% of scam calls. If you used to get 30 scam calls a week, that cuts it down to three scam calls. They’re heading to cutting it down to one or fewer a week. They are covering 62 million customers and they see every call that is made to them. [22:08] There is about 2K of data for each incoming call. This includes where it came from, where it’s going, and the routing that gets it there, the equipment that sent it, and other characteristics of the call. [22:28] PrivacyStar does not get involved in the voice call itself, and they are careful not to transmit outside of the network the call is being made to, to protect personal information. The only data they take outside the network is not identifiable to the person receiving the call. [22:53] In ten years, First Orion has come a long way. Eighteen months after Charles’s initial $1 million investment, the company was out of money. Charles had a big decision to make. His gut told him to put more money into it. His worst-case scenario told him he could lose another few million and it would not impact his lifestyle significantly. [23:53] Charles doesn’t make decisions out of fear, or because he has to. He says people make terrible decisions at times of dissolution of marriage or bankruptcy or another financial nightmare. People should not make decisions at the time of trouble. [24:25] Charles made the decision that he believed in First Orion for the long-term. The idea was adapted to mobile technology instead of the originally planned wire-line network software. [24:38] In 2000, Charles started getting excited about mobile technology. In 2009-2010 Charles realized that this little computer you put in your hand was going to change the world. They started with a Blackberry app and realized there would be a lot more mobile devices. [25:19] A successful entrepreneur or executive needs to be inspired by dealing with multiple difficult issues. If problems worry you to death, you probably ought to be doing something else. When Charles sleeps, he does not want to lay awake worrying. [25:53] Don’t sit and mope about something — do something about it! Sometimes it’s better to do something, even if it’s wrong. You can’t be frozen by indecision. Take action to move toward a solution. Hit problems head-on. [26:37] A good entrepreneur has got to move quickly — measuredly but quickly. [26:56] Charles describes how he went from observing to taking over the company. It came down to the decision to either stop putting money into it to lose or to take over with a plan to turn the company around. He planned for First Orion to make a profit by December of 2013, and they did it. [28:19] You can’t direct that kind of change from over the fence. [28:24] It was a problem for Charles to win over the non-believers at the company. Charles came up with a very specific plan with the detailed changes he was going to make in how they organize and approach things. He declared he would take on the task cut their IT cost in half. He delegated other problems at the company to other staff. [29:19] Charles cut the IT cost by more than half, trading pay cuts for stock options. He wants everybody to be a partner and not an employee. Putting stock in their hands with options does that. [29:39] You can’t just have good technology. You can’t just have good people. You need good products, good service, and other things. For a small company, these are even more important. [29:51] Charles is audacious, meeting with senior people like he has a right to have a relationship with them. In the early days at Acxiom, Charles took it on himself as a challenge to meet with senior people at Citi. He kept pushing the relationship higher and higher to the head of the credit card department. The relationship is important. [31:27] Now, First Orion’s service is important to the senior-most people at T-Mobile and the carriers. So they are getting the same kind of relationship with them. John Legere, T-Mobile CEO, knows very well who First Orion is and has some dialog with First Orion President, Jeff Stalnaker. There is regular communication with top executives. [32:00] First Orion first thought they were providing a service. Now they see themselves as a data analytics company, using data analytics to make the phone experience better. Charles compares the services of Acxiom and First Orion. It’s all about the data. [33:26] First Orion uses a massive AWS footprint to do a lot of analytics. They use software in the network that takes the AWS data and builds a knowledge base to compare each phone call against. They do this comparison about 175 million times a day. They send the results of the comparisons back into AWS to update the analytics. [34:24] They update the analytics every six minutes. It is very challenging to stay ahead of the scammers. The carriers themselves built into the system, for their own reasons, the ability to obscure the source of a call. This was before scam calls were common. [35:42] First Orion has 50 people continually iterating the software. It can never stop. [36:02] Scammers today are sending texts and emails with a scam fraud alert phone number for the recipient to call and get scammed. People fall for it in amazing numbers. [36:29] First Orion has blocked or tagged 10 billion calls. The savings to the customers at T-Mobile is now in the billions of dollars. [37:08] Charles talks about how he recruited some of the early employees to Acxiom, telling them they would have fun and he would do everything he could to make sure they became millionaires. [37:24] A lot of the reward Charles got between Acxiom and First Orion is being able to help people out. Acxiom made quite a few millionaires. At First Orion, Charles has given out 25% of the company as stock options to the employees. Stockholders will make a lot of money if First Orion is successful. [38:01] First Orion is looking to monetize. They are generating good cash flow. Charles would like to start buying people’s stock back from them and allow them to monetize significant numbers of dollars and not have to wait until the company is sold. Charles does not really want to run a public company again. [38:38] What is it about Arkansas water or the soil that has nourished a disproportionate number of very successful entrepreneurs, including the Fords, the Waltons, the Stephens, the Tysons, the Dillards, the Murphys, and the Morgans? Charles used the working title “It’s in the Water” for his book, Now What? as he was fascinated by that. [39:12] Charles did research the topic and interviewed some of the big names. There is something about the culture of Arkansas that allows success to happen. Charles doesn’t want to preview his next book, but that will be in it! [39:54] Charles Morgan is capitalism, and This is Capitalism.   Mentioned in This Episode: Stephens.com Charles Morgan IBM Sam Walton Walmart Acxiom First Orion PrivacyStar App for iPhone PrivacyStar App for Android 24 Hours at Daytona Matters of Life and Data: The Remarkable Journey of a Big Data Visionary Whose Work Impacted Millions (Including You), by Charles D. Morgan Andersen Windows Now What? The Biography Of A (Finally) Successful Startup, by Charles D. Morgan Jeff Stalnaker Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 Jeff Ubben Bill Dillard T-Mobile Citi John Legere Amazon AWS Companies based in or started in Arkansas This Is Capitalism

When Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, met the business end of a Swiss halberd in 1477, his 19-year-old daughter Mary was set to inherit all of his vast possessions. But her position was precarious, surrounded by rapacious neighbors and rivals. The decisions she made about her future set in motion a chain of political events that would define Europe for centuries to come.Support this show by supporting our sponsors! The Art of Shaving - Get 15% off your first order by using the code TIDES at checkout. LinkedIn - Go to LinkedIn.com/TIDES and get $50 off your first job post. Uber Rewards - Go to Uber.com/Rewards to learn more!

When Charles is away, the boys are at play... Or plays. Here is a theatre themed episode! --- If you have any questions about Movies/TV/Theatre/Etc. Please throw us a line! Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SomethingRandomLLC/ Email: podcast@somethingrandommedia.com Website: www.somethingrandommedia.com Merch Store:https://www.redbubble.com/people/smtngrndm

When Charles de Gaulle issued his famous call in June 1940 for the French people to continue fighting Nazi Germany, among those within Occupied France who took up the cause was his young niece Genevieve. In The General’s Niece: The Little Known de Gaulle Who Fought to Free Occupied France (Chicago Review Press, 2017), Paige Bowers tells the story of her life, one lived in perilous times. The daughter of Charles’s oldest brother Xavier, when war broke out Genevieve found herself buffeted by the dislocations that resulted. In the aftermath of the German conquest, she moved from small acts of individual defiance to full participation in the burgeoning Resistance movement, where she helped to educate her countrymen about her previously obscure uncle. Though her possession of the de Gaulle name often drew unwanted attention from the Occupation authorities, she found daring ways to use it to her advantage. Genevieve’s arrest in June 1943 led to her detention in the Ravensbruck concentration camp, an experience which as Bowers shows fueled her postwar activities on behalf of her fellow Resistance detainees, as well as her subsequent activism to fight to end chronic poverty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When Charles de Gaulle issued his famous call in June 1940 for the French people to continue fighting Nazi Germany, among those within Occupied France who took up the cause was his young niece Genevieve. In The General’s Niece: The Little Known de Gaulle Who Fought to Free Occupied France (Chicago Review Press, 2017), Paige Bowers tells the story of her life, one lived in perilous times. The daughter of Charles’s oldest brother Xavier, when war broke out Genevieve found herself buffeted by the dislocations that resulted. In the aftermath of the German conquest, she moved from small acts of individual defiance to full participation in the burgeoning Resistance movement, where she helped to educate her countrymen about her previously obscure uncle. Though her possession of the de Gaulle name often drew unwanted attention from the Occupation authorities, she found daring ways to use it to her advantage. Genevieve’s arrest in June 1943 led to her detention in the Ravensbruck concentration camp, an experience which as Bowers shows fueled her postwar activities on behalf of her fellow Resistance detainees, as well as her subsequent activism to fight to end chronic poverty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When Charles de Gaulle issued his famous call in June 1940 for the French people to continue fighting Nazi Germany, among those within Occupied France who took up the cause was his young niece Genevieve. In The General’s Niece: The Little Known de Gaulle Who Fought to Free Occupied France (Chicago Review Press, 2017), Paige Bowers tells the story of her life, one lived in perilous times. The daughter of Charles’s oldest brother Xavier, when war broke out Genevieve found herself buffeted by the dislocations that resulted. In the aftermath of the German conquest, she moved from small acts of individual defiance to full participation in the burgeoning Resistance movement, where she helped to educate her countrymen about her previously obscure uncle. Though her possession of the de Gaulle name often drew unwanted attention from the Occupation authorities, she found daring ways to use it to her advantage. Genevieve’s arrest in June 1943 led to her detention in the Ravensbruck concentration camp, an experience which as Bowers shows fueled her postwar activities on behalf of her fellow Resistance detainees, as well as her subsequent activism to fight to end chronic poverty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When Charles de Gaulle issued his famous call in June 1940 for the French people to continue fighting Nazi Germany, among those within Occupied France who took up the cause was his young niece Genevieve. In The General’s Niece: The Little Known de Gaulle Who Fought to Free Occupied France (Chicago Review Press, 2017), Paige Bowers tells the story of her life, one lived in perilous times. The daughter of Charles’s oldest brother Xavier, when war broke out Genevieve found herself buffeted by the dislocations that resulted. In the aftermath of the German conquest, she moved from small acts of individual defiance to full participation in the burgeoning Resistance movement, where she helped to educate her countrymen about her previously obscure uncle. Though her possession of the de Gaulle name often drew unwanted attention from the Occupation authorities, she found daring ways to use it to her advantage. Genevieve’s arrest in June 1943 led to her detention in the Ravensbruck concentration camp, an experience which as Bowers shows fueled her postwar activities on behalf of her fellow Resistance detainees, as well as her subsequent activism to fight to end chronic poverty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When Charles de Gaulle issued his famous call in June 1940 for the French people to continue fighting Nazi Germany, among those within Occupied France who took up the cause was his young niece Genevieve. In The General’s Niece: The Little Known de Gaulle Who Fought to Free Occupied France (Chicago Review Press, 2017), Paige Bowers tells the story of her life, one lived in perilous times. The daughter of Charles’s oldest brother Xavier, when war broke out Genevieve found herself buffeted by the dislocations that resulted. In the aftermath of the German conquest, she moved from small acts of individual defiance to full participation in the burgeoning Resistance movement, where she helped to educate her countrymen about her previously obscure uncle. Though her possession of the de Gaulle name often drew unwanted attention from the Occupation authorities, she found daring ways to use it to her advantage. Genevieve’s arrest in June 1943 led to her detention in the Ravensbruck concentration camp, an experience which as Bowers shows fueled her postwar activities on behalf of her fellow Resistance detainees, as well as her subsequent activism to fight to end chronic poverty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When Charles de Gaulle issued his famous call in June 1940 for the French people to continue fighting Nazi Germany, among those within Occupied France who took up the cause was his young niece Genevieve. In The General’s Niece: The Little Known de Gaulle Who Fought to Free Occupied France (Chicago Review Press, 2017), Paige Bowers tells the story of her life, one lived in perilous times. The daughter of Charles’s oldest brother Xavier, when war broke out Genevieve found herself buffeted by the dislocations that resulted. In the aftermath of the German conquest, she moved from small acts of individual defiance to full participation in the burgeoning Resistance movement, where she helped to educate her countrymen about her previously obscure uncle. Though her possession of the de Gaulle name often drew unwanted attention from the Occupation authorities, she found daring ways to use it to her advantage. Genevieve’s arrest in June 1943 led to her detention in the Ravensbruck concentration camp, an experience which as Bowers shows fueled her postwar activities on behalf of her fellow Resistance detainees, as well as her subsequent activism to fight to end chronic poverty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week on the Major Spoilers Podcast: Goldie Vance Vol. 1 goes under the microscope this week, and we discuss Jupiter Jet, the new Kickstarter from jason Inman and Ashley Victoria Robinson. Plus reviews of Aether Revolt, Justice League of America: The Ray Rebirth #1, and Cougar and Cub #1. Show your thanks to Major Spoilers for this episode by becoming a Major Spoilers Patron. It will help ensure The Major Spoilers Podcast continues far into the future! NEWS Jupiter Jet is Coming! http://Jupiterjetcomic.com Marvel changes digital code policy http://majorspoilers.com/2017/01/08/digital-comics-marvel-updates-digital-code-program-include-bonus-digital-comics/ REVIEWS STEPHEN JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA: THE RAY REBIRTH #1 Writer: Steve Orlando Artist: Stephen Byrne Publisher: DC Comics Cover Price: Price: $2.99 Locked indoors, raised in the dark and told his medical condition could be fatal to himself and anyone he meets, Ray Terrill is dangerous. A freak. Broken. Or is he…? Witness the amazing power of realizing your true self and stepping into the light in this moving rebirth of a long-lost hero for a new generation. [rating:4/5] MATTHEW COUGAR & CUB #1 Writer(s): Nick Marino, Rosie Knight Artist Name(s): Daniel Arruda Massa The courageous Cougar and the cunning Cub are Megaville's ferocious feline fighters, tussling with an outrageous rogues gallery and prowling the city for crime all the time. But when a slow night on the job turns into a saucy encounter in the sack, the age old question will finally be answered... WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A SUPERHERO HAS SEX WITH THEIR SIDEKICK? Don't miss this sin-tillating new series from the creators of HOLY F*CK, with bombastic backups written by newcomer Rosie Knight! [rating: 2.5/5] RODRIGO Aether Revolt Aether Revolt is the 73rd Magic expansion, and the second in the Kaladesh block. [rating:3/5] ASHLEY PARADOX Writer/Artist: Philip Sevy The story of a boy who is his own father ... paradoxcomic.tumblr.com [rating: 4/5] MAJOR SPOILERS POLL OF THE WEEK http://majorspoilers.com/2017/01/17/major-spoilers-poll-week-fight-superfight/ If you want to suggest a trade paperback, you need to send an email to podcast@majorspoilers.com. That suggestion will go into the hopper and at least once a month, we’ll pick a number of suggestions for you to vote on, and at the end of the polling period, the book with the most votes will get the Major Spoilers Podcast treatment. DISCUSSION GOLDIE VANCE VOL. 1 Writer: Hope Larson Artist: Brittney Williams Publisher: BOOM! Studios Move over Nancy, Harriet, & Veronica. There's a new sleuth on the block! Sixteen-year-old Marigold “Goldie” Vance lives at a Florida resort with her dad, who manages the place. Her mom, who divorced her dad years ago, works as a live mermaid at a club downtown. Goldie has an insatiable curiosity, which explains her dream to one day become the hotel’s in-house detective. When Charles, the current detective, encounters a case he can’t crack, he agrees to mentor Goldie in exchange for her help solving the mystery. Eisner Award-winning writer Hope Larson (A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel) and artist Brittney Williams (Patsy Walker, A.K.A Hellcat!) present the newest gal sleuth on the block with Goldie Vance, an exciting, whodunnit adventure. CLOSE Contact us at podcast@majorspoilers.com Call the Major Spoilers Hotline at (785) 727-1939. A big Thank You goes out to everyone who downloads, subscribes, listens, and supports this show. We really appreciate you taking the time to listen to our ramblings each week. Tell your friends!

EWelcome to episode 35 of the Mobile Home Park Investors podcast, hosted by Jefferson Lilly and Brad Johnson, with the Park Street Partners. This is episode part 2 of the interview with Charles Becker, a professor in the economics department at Duke University. Charles discusses why corporate buyers tend to get the better deal, his research on the amount of rent being charged, and much more, on this week’s episode!   Key Takeaways: [1:35] What kind of park buyers get the best deals? [3:45] What are Charles’s thoughts on the mobile home park rent amount? Is it too little, is it too high? [7:50] What will the rate of growth be in the next ten years? [11:00] The nation needs to see this as affordable housing. [11:25] Will financing options change for mobile home park buyers? [12:50] Manufactured housing parks do not make neighbors richer. [16:25] When Charles started off researching this industry, he was a bit skeptical, but the numbers clearly show that it’s a viable option for many people. [17:40] Charles is always looking for new data, and he is currently very interested in turnover rates.   Mentioned in This Episode: Park Street Partners www.parkstreetpartners.com Mobile Home Park Investors www.mobilehomeparkinvestors.net   Investment Opportunities Park Street Partners Business Resources LinkedIn: Mobile Home Park Investors Group Send deals to: deals@parkstreetpartners.net Charles Becker

Keeper opens the Pool tonight with a return splash!!! Charles Kacprowicz (caprowitz) founder and president of Countermand Amendment. When Charles jumps in, you're gonna get soaked. This is information you must have. Gaining traction everywhere...no slipping on the deck from running! Then a bit later, Virginia Delegate Dave LaRock jumps in. Coming out of Loud on Virginia, this guy is all business...you'll get that point Wednesday night!!! Music and more at the Pool!!!

The Chicago Transit Authority hosts some of the best and worst experiences. When Charles got on to the Brown Line train at Kimball he thought it would be another average ride to work. In many cases it was; Charles explains his interactions with Missed Connections and other various Craiglisters.

Charles Gaudet is widely recognized as a leading business coach for entrepreneurs who aren't willing to settle for mediocre profits - and want to out-think, out-market, and out-earn their competition. He is the driving force behind marketing strategies that have earned as much as 6-figures within just 24 hours! Charles' website is Predictable Profits "Out Think, Out Profit, Out Earn!" - Charles Gaudet Inspiration: "Freud would probably have a field day on me." Charles' father owned his own business and there were times he would come home and he would tell Charles, "Kid, if you ever want to make it for yourself you have to start your own business." also "Hey Kid, I want you to remember one thing. Employees suck. Don't ever be an employee." Charles does say that he does disagree in part as focusing on the idea that everybody works with you, not for you. When Charles started selling artwork to his neighbors it started him on the path due in part to the feeling of satisfaction from getting the approval of his father. Challenge: Charles found himself quickly in a vast amount of debt, personal relationships were shot, and he was working nearly every waking hour every day of the week. Lack of sleep and pains all over his body were the signs of over stress and the doctors started to say that the stress was going to kill him. Charles didn't really think that it wasn't out of the norm to be doing what he was. Passion: Charles is highly passionate with his children and spending time with his family. He loves to live life to the fullest. His son and daughter both have their own businesses with cards and stationary. Advice: The best business advise that Charles ever received he says was from about 20 years ago. At the time he wanted to create a new business. He went to meet with his mentor at the time and he said, "Charlie, it doesn't matter, you're so focused on the idea. The idea DOESN'T matter, you could sell paper-clips, if you make the best paper-clip to market and show people that you can do it in a unique a more beneficial way you will create a million dollar business in no time." Blogs, Books & Podcasts: The Predictable Profits Playbook - Charles Gaudet Looking Back: Charles says if he had to do it all over again he would focus on working smart. Really focusing in on that whole concept. Marketing and innovation is the only thing that grows a business, everything else is an expense. Interview Links: Learn more about Charles by visiting him at Predictable Profits. Click Here to Subscribe in iTunes Follow us via Stitcher Listen in via RSS Ready to unleash YOUR Purpose? Sign up for our free weekly The Online Biz Workshop @ TheOnlineBizWebinar ________________________ The post Charles Gaudet appeared first on .

This week, Aaron Herman had the opportunity to chat with Sandy Cardin, the President of the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Foundation. How do you build organizations and get funding to sustain projects? We spoke with Sandy Cardin President of the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Foundation about funding and creating innovative Jewish programs. When Charles and Lynn Schusterman established their family foundation in 1987, they were led by a fierce determination to contribute their time and resources to the two communities closest to their hearts: k’lal Yisrael—Jewish peoplehood—and the people in their hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

This week, Aaron Herman had the opportunity to chat with Sandy Cardin, the President of the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Foundation. How do you build organizations and get funding to sustain projects? We spoke with Sandy Cardin President of the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Foundation about funding and creating innovative Jewish programs. When Charles and Lynn Schusterman established their family foundation in 1987, they were led by a fierce determination to contribute their time and resources to the two communities closest to their hearts: k’lal Yisrael—Jewish peoplehood—and the people in their hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

When Charles plays a chord-melody arrangement, people invariably ask, "How'd you do that?" Here, he shows you how. The staple is knowing how to rearrange standard chord voicings, moving notes up or down an octave to create different melodies and textures. Pretty soon you too could be hearing that satisfying refrain: "How'd you do that?" This lesson includes Power Tab and is featured on the following CD compilations: ACOUSTIC U, JAZZ U.

Charles has been called "an ambitious combination of comedy, compassion, enlightenment and intense bravado in one embodiment!" and I would have to agree. When Charles was on in April his combination of humor (good for ratings) and accurate readings (good for callers) was a hit with the Achieve audience, and we're excited to have him back.

Charles has been called "an ambitious combination of comedy, compassion, enlightenment and intense bravado in one embodiment!" and I would have to agree. When Charles was on in April his combination of humor (good for ratings) and accurate readings (good for callers) was a hit with the Achieve audience, and we're excited to have him back.

Charles has been called "an ambitious combination of comedy, compassion, enlightenment and intense bravado in one embodiment!" and I would have to agree. When Charles was on in April his combination of humor (good for ratings) and accurate readings (good for callers) was a hit with the Achieve audience, and we're excited to have him back.

Charles has been called "an ambitious combination of comedy, compassion, enlightenment and intense bravado in one embodiment!" and I would have to agree. When Charles was on in April his combination of humor (good for ratings) and accurate readings (good for callers) was a hit with the Achieve audience, and we're excited to have him back.