Editor's note: Joining the ranks of The Chronicle's columnists is Gordon Aadland, an 81-year-old Centralia resident with a distinguished background as a writer, as a publicist and as an educator.
Although new to the newspaper in this capacity, Aadland is no rookie when it comes to writing columns.
"It all started," he recently wrote, "when I wrote a humor column for my high school newspaper and kids would say, 'Hey, I seen yur colyum in the paper' and grin idiotically."
Later, he wrote humor columns for the University of South Dakota newspaper, and for a South Dakota sports newspaper started by Al Neuharth, later head of the Gannett Co.
Hereabouts, Aadland is perhaps best known as a longtime teacher and public information director at Centralia College.
Aadland's column will appear periodically in The Chronicle, as his muse permits.
A few decades ago, Don McLean mourned, in song, "The Day the Music Died."
Now, many of us who lived in the first half of the 20th century are regretting the loss of one form of music — whistling.
As we grew up, we were surrounded by whistling. We didn't have portable radios, so we furnished our own music wherever we were. In the home, Dad puckered up while mending the screen door. For Grandpa, whistling and whittling were a natural combination. We whistled for our kids to come home for supper, or for our dogs.
There was whistling in the workplace, by the cop ambling on his beat, the grocer stocking the shelves, the kid delivering the newspaper.
One of the big records of the 1920s, on one of those thick 78s, was the whistling of a song named "The Whistler and His Dog." On radio, Bing Crosby would break away from his crooning long enough to whistle a few verses of his current hit. The most popular mystery series on radio was "The Whistler."
There were even professional practitioners. Featured on the radio show hosted by Horace Heidt and his Musical Knights was a whistling soloist, Elmo Tanner.
In the movies, Snow White's Seven Dwarves told us to "Whistle While You Work." Anna in "The King and I" advised her son that when he was afraid of anything, he should "Whistle a Happy Tune." Another song told us that when we were in a funk, we should "Give a Little Whistle."
We all remembered that moment on the silver screen when Lauren Bacall, exiting a room, said to Humphrey Bogart, very seductively, "If you want me, just whistle."
I don't want to give the impression that everyone whistled. Women didn't publicly. It was considered unladylike. Whistling was a masculine thing to do. Many a lad felt he had reached true manhood when he was finally able to put his two little fingers into his mouth and let loose a shrill blast.
Most of all, whistling was a reflection of happy times, of an era when life was more relaxed and less complicated.
Does it then mean that today's tensions and lifestyles have brought about the demise of this art form? Did it start at Hiroshima? Dealey Plaza? My Lai? The Watergate Apartments? The Twin Towers? We'll leave it up to the psychologists, maybe the philosophers, to grapple with that.
But if you want to recapture the relaxed, carefree attitude that fostered whistling in the pre-World War II days, watch a rerun of TV's "Mayberry R.F.D." In the introduction, Sheriff Andy Taylor and his son, Opie, are strolling down a country lane, with their fishing rods on their shoulders, blithely on their way to Mayberry's favorite fishing spot. The whole thing is accompanied by whistling.
Today Sheriff Taylor is probably, with furrowed brow, on orange alert for terrorism, and little Opie is likely playing computer war games, with a boom box on his shoulder.
It's the era when the whistling has died.
