All About M.E.

By Mel Elzea

This autobiography is a must-read to prepare you to find Mel and his great next project above the sky’s limits in the cosmos. His artist business partner says, “If you read his autobiography, you will have a chance because you will like being first.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 31, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796010459

Book preview

Copyright © 2019 by Mel Elzea.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2019901011

ISBN:                  Hardcover                       978-1-7960-1047-3

                            Softcover                         978-1-7960-1046-6

                            eBook                              978-1-7960-1045-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Both Covers, All Graphics and page designs by Mel Elzea

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 01/30/2019

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

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Contents

Chapter 1     My Day of Infamy

Chapter 2     Small Town Living

Chapter 3     Deep In Depression

Chapter 4     MY 5th MOVE

Chapter 5     Music to my Ears

Chapter 6     ‘47 - Eleven Year Old Discoveries

Chapter 7     Girls!

Chapter 8     The Calling

Chapter 9     Delayed Therapy

Chapter 10   Six Months on Unfamiliar Ground

Chapter 11   Westward HO!

Chapter 12   What Mamma Wrote

Chapter 13   My Day in Infamy II

Chapter 14   Rome

Chapter 15   Television Was Family Back Then

Chapter 16   Evaluating Todays News

Chapter 17   Frank Up Front

Chapter 18   What?

Chapter 19   Sales Persuasion Flamboyance

Chapter 20   Why I Dislike

Chapter 21   Payback Forwarded

Chapter 22   Barking Spiders

Chapter 23   Duh! Automation

Chapter 24   Show Me the Money

Chapter 25   Pioneering Cable

Chapter 27   I’m Not Dead, Yet!

Chapter 28   Controlling the Airways and Space

Chapter 29   Smile

Chapter 30   Best and Worst of the Rest

Chapter 31   Last Chapter of m.e. Open Notes

About the Author

While attempting to bring notoriety to and for others in communications, music, stage, television and radio I ran across m.e. in this book.

Performance from God given talents were allowed to surface early in my life. I find myself reflecting at every age that I have experienced to follow that course of action as a guided path from those that instilled a belief in myself through an ability to be taught.

The majority of this life story is just about me and what molded me into a willing person that would love working and pioneering some of the media’s capabilities. I created some things that others couldn’t dream of, if that, but when they had a good idea they never had the nerve to go through with anything or take the chance.

Seventeen

Almost everyone that will read All About m. e. can relate to your seventeenth year. Many happenings in my lifetime were in my seventeenth year. So many!

But before I was out of my teens, NBC’s Don Cunningham unknowingly told me a direction I would eventually take. Don was a field producer and newsman on the NBC Dave Garraway’s Wide Wide World Sunday Show. The very first network live remote telecasting program series in America. The first broadcast on NBC that I ran camera on was about the Great American Authors from a camera position inside the Mark Twains’ boyhood home in Hannibal, Missouri in the fifties.

Well Mr. Cunningham this book is going to tell everyone else that reads it what you wanted to do, I did for me, by doing it fourteen years after our conversation in Hannibal, Missouri. I started part time while working full time, before going big time in a short time in all time zones of the forty-eight.

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What do you think about television? Simplified, you either like it, love it or loath it as there is no other choice, yet you do all three each time you look at it. If you like it, you turn it on. If you love it, you leave it on. If you loath it, you turn it off. It either educates, informs or entertains but most of all it controls your very being, because your viewing it makes everything up until now the greatest form of one way communications for the human race that has ever been invented. If you talk back to your TV screen when you disagree or agree, you need off-switch therapy.

Before I was twenty-one I had television figured out. Television is not just a gold ring but many gold rings, one of which was caught by m. e. and is exposed in my life’s story. I discovered my destiny was by me accepting positive thought as the longer journey in radio and television.

This entertainment television industry is always looking for content to burn up. An endless story answers what they all are looking for in episodic television that they won’t be able to get rid of by over-exposure. Like the fledgling television industry, my story is filled with unbelievable encounters in this modern communication and entertainment industry. The problem is the powers that must happen have very little time to get it right, because time is running out. All the real players are now few.

They received their last curtain calls after developing TV in the late fifties through the nineties.

Audiences were accomplished by knowledge of those serving in those trenches making television.

Today people clamor to accept negative thought as their destiny by choosing tabloid reporting on satellite, Internet, cable and broadcast news. Those in charge keep making a history for a television industries demise prediction to come true. I heard the FCC’s chairman Newton Minnow call it, "A vast waste…land!"

You choose to go where your life goes by seeking, finding and knowing the positive. Television is not what I know, but only what I was taught in my life time to let you know. Television captures your mind. First, you are hooked by my stories and then my visually enticing you, then by adding subliminal music, dramatic audible persuasion and reasoning. Find out how it is done, by how it was done by living some minutes with me. Check out my reasoning of how I became qualified to do so.

This is my true story of those precise and most accurate and vivid memories shared with you. I thought about it for at least the past eight years, and then I started banging the keyboard, Chapter I, it relates to the first of many times that I captivated an audience’s interest and held them spell bound without a microphone and camera until I was seventeen.

Let’s set the mood scene: This story begins with lyrics being sung of a music cut from the Breakfast in America Album,

Take the Long Way Home.

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‘32 Model-B Coupe

I re-built it in ’52 when it was twenty-one-years-old in ‘53

Get ready for your rumble seat ride!

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Prospecting & Pioneering

In

Broadcast Television

FM Radio

Telecommunications

&

Remote Television Production

Chapter 1

My Day of Infamy

Before Black & White Television

The recessional organ and piano music began announcing the end of service for this five year old first grade boy who just broke away from between my mother and father in the church pew and quickly departed down the long aisle to be the first to leave the sanctuary after the minister. I quickly shook hands with the pastor and raced down the long concrete stairs in front of the church. I ran full speed down the sidewalk of a little used street, stopping at the corner, looking both ways to see if there was a rare car coming from either direction. Observing none, I continued my full out run toward home just a couple more small town blocks away. Winter was fast approaching but the sun made the late fall day a welcomed sight. This is the same scene that I had lived every Sunday morning a little after high noon. I was full-out trying to break my record time by beating everyone home to feed the hungry lion under my belt and to eat the cookie I had saved for my speedy return trip home. I also knew that the town siren wouldn’t go off at high noon because it was Sunday and all the towns’ preachers convinced the city fathers that they didn’t need to distract the town’s sinners from getting saved by the siren when the invitational was given a little late. High Noon in our town was being used long before they made the movie including this very day.

Families of the time lived for each other, cared for each other and were thankful for better times to come since the deep depression was still lingering in this small rural Missouri town in 1941. The 1932 Model B Ford was nine years old at the time. Houses had no air-conditioning so the windows were all up and you could hear Cardinal baseball games as you walked the sidewalks of town. We were yet to hear a portable radio because they were still not invented in 1941.

Everyone knew everyone and the neighbors looked out for each other in this not so abundant time.

Having exhausted most of my wind on the next to the last block as my house came into view, I slowed to regain enough power to sprint the last half-block home. Suddenly, my neighbor Mr. Shultz bolted onto his front porch and began yelling to his neighbor’s house across the street. Back then, people knew who lived in the whole town and helped each other and looked out for their neighbor because they talked every day and shared every day the important morals, gardening tips and prepared foods they had canned for the coming winter days. It is what Mr. Shultz was yelling that stopped this five year old, soon to be six in thirty-six days … dead in my tracks. I heard Mr. Shultz as he repeated his story twice to the neighbor who had appeared on his porch across the street. He said, "It just came over the radio," and he repeated the same story not realizing there was a five year-old neighbor taking it all-in down on the sidewalk. When he discovered I was there he said hello and called me by name. Mr. Shultz asked if I had overheard what he had just said, as he could undoubtedly see the fright on my face. Actually, I had heard every word and thought that I would never ever see my mother, father and brother ever again. After he asked me what I had heard, I asked Mr. Shultz to tell me the story once again, which he did, and I turned and ran faster than I had ever run in my life back toward the church to get the story to my mom and dad. As I ran toward the church, I wondered if what I had heard meant it was just west of Farber, a town about six miles away to the west on highway 54. Just to be sure, I ran even faster.

The congregation always gathered on the front church steps after services where they shared stories of the past weeks happenings, births, deaths, weddings and bargains at my Great Uncle Mark’s food locker and grocery store. There was no television in 1941. Television would not have an impact until 1953 as the only signal was out of St. Louis. KSD-5 of the very late ‘40’s would be allowed to increase to full power in the early fifties.

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This is my fast lane home on State Street in Vandalia, Missouri that went by Mr. Schultz home. 1941 sidewalk, picture taken in 2014.

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I ran back to find my mother four steps up from the first landing. Church pictures taken in 2014.

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The concrete pillars and corner stone were made in Vandalia. The church is in excellent physical shape ninety years later in 2014. Its foundation was rocked by m.e. announcing Pearl Harbor on Sunday after 12 noon December 7th 1941

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Mules helped raise pillars of churches back then! The people of the plains became synonymous with those pillars. Vandalia’s farmland region was considered near the place where the mule gave its name to Missouri as the Mule State.

This time I never stopped running until I came to the church steps and frantically looked for my mother and dad. I could feel my heart beat in my neck and could barely breathe. Huffing and puffing I told mom, what our neighbor Mr. Shultz had just reported to me.

My mother held me by the shoulders and said, "Slow down and take a deep breath. Still breathless, I related what my message was and she quickly yelled to my dad to come and hear what I had just heard from their neighbor, Mr. Shultz. Once again I announced to my dad and several of the congregation that the Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor and we were under attack by the Japanese navy. It was an un-forgettable moment that would best-be-vilified on a national radio broadcast as a, moment in infamy," by President Roosevelt from the capital of our forty-eight states and previously announced by m. e., Melvin Elzea, on the First Christian Church steps in Vandalia, Missouri. The families of America have never been as close as they were that night as it darkened everyone’s doorstep. This is to become a momentous event that would change the very foundation of the American family and its self-disciplined order, forever, but only for those who lived it. One of the congregations members lived across the street from the church and said he would go turn his radio on to see if my announcement was for real. It seemed like forever, but after about ten minutes the church member came out of his house and yelling from his front porch, said, Melvin was right, we have lost our whole Pacific navy in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. In a brief moment, the congregation hurriedly left the churches stairs to gain more knowledge about the announcement made by me, a five year old on the church steps, a little after twelve noon that Sunday on December 7th, 1941.

Most of all, it would be the first of many announcements made and shown by me to millions during my lifetime and revisited in my memory of future catastrophic happenings to come to the now fifty United States. This five year old was announcing to the Christian Church congregation on its steps in Vandalia, Missouri while pictures were being taken by a box camera in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. December 7th 1941.

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This was taking place at the moment my breath was being taken away in the middle of the forty-eight United States of America.

The photos were taken by a personal Kodak Brownie box camera and the film was discovered still there many years after 1941.

I will never forget this day or when President Roosevelt’s, "Day of Infamy speech to the nation …"

Sunday December 7th 1941: A Closer Look!

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On Sunday, December 7th, 1941 the Japanese launched a surprise attack against the U.S. Forces stationed at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. By planning his attack on a Sunday, the Japanese commander Admiral Nagumo, hoped to catch the entire fleet in port. As luck would have it, the Aircraft Carriers and one of the Battleships were not in port. (The USS Enterprise was returning from Wake Island, where it had just delivered some aircraft. The USS Lexington was ferrying aircraft to Midway, and the USS Saratoga and USS Colorado were undergoing repairs in the United States.)

In spite of the latest intelligence reports about the missing aircraft carriers (his most important targets), Admiral Nagumo decided to continue the attack with his force of six carriers and 423 aircraft. At a range of 230 miles north of Oahu, he launched the first wave of a two-wave attack. Beginning at 0600 hours his first wave consisted of 183 fighters and torpedo bombers which struck at the fleet in Pearl Harbor and the airfields in Hickam, Kaneohe and Ewa. The second strike, launched at 0715 hours, consisted of 167 aircraft, which again struck at the same targets.

At 0753 hours the first wave consisting of 40 Nakajima

The True Life Happening

B5N2 Kate torpedo bombers, 51 Aichi D3A1 Val dive bombers, 50 high altitude bombers and 43 Zeros struck airfields and Pearl Harbor Within the next hour, the second wave arrived and continued the attack.

When it was over, the U.S. losses were:

Casualties

USA: 218 KIA, 364 WIA.

USN: 2,008 KIA, 710 WIA.

USMC: 109 KIA, 69 WIA.

Civilians: 68 KIA, 35 WIA.

TOTAL: 2,403 KIA, 1,178 WIA.

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Battleships

USS Arizona (BB-39) - total loss when a bomb hit her magazine.

USS Oklahoma (BB-37) - Total loss when she capsized and sank in the harbor.

USS California (BB-44) - Sunk at her berth. Later raised and repaired.

USS West Virginia (BB-48) - Sunk at her berth. Later raised and repaired.

USS Nevada - (BB-36) Beached to prevent sinking. Later repaired.

USS Pennsylvania (BB-38) - Light damage.

USS Maryland (BB-46) - Light damage.

USS Tennessee (BB-43) Light damage.

USS Utah (AG-16) - (former battleship used as a target) - Sunk.

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Cruisers

USS New Orleans (CA-32) - Light Damage.

USS San Francisco (CA38) - Light Damage.

USS Detroit (CL-8) - Light Damage.

USS Raleigh (CL-7) - Heavily damaged but repaired.

USS Helena (CL-50) - Light Damage.

USS Honolulu (CL-48) - Light Damage.

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Destroyers

USS Downes (DD-375) - Destroyed. Parts salvaged.

USS Cassin - (DD-37 2) Destroyed. Parts salvaged.

USS Shaw (DD-373) - Very heavy damage.

USS Helm (DD-388) - Light Damage.

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Minelayer

USS Ogala (CM-4) - Sunk but later raised and repaired.

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Seaplane Tender

USS Curtiss (AV-4) - Severely damaged but later repaired.

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Repair Ship

USS Vestal (AR-4) - Severely damaged but later repaired.

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Harbor Tug

USS Sotoyomo (YT-9) - Sunk but later raised and repaired.

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Aircraft

188 Aircraft destroyed (92 USN and 92 U.S. Army Air Corps.)

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On the way home that Sunday I told my mother I thought Mr. Shultz had said we were attacked at Pearl Farber and that had really scared me. Mom assured me that it was Pearl Harbor thousands of miles away in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and not Farber six miles west of town. I now realize that is why I have always made people repeat everything they want me to really know.

Though television had not arrived in the Midwest, the December 7th news became what I have considered my first trigger that pulled me and drew me into the profession of television. Can you imagine that thirty four days later I became six years old on January 10th, 1942? My first real fear started with all of the new dark green window shades in the house being pulled down when the town sirens wailed announcing an air raid in the middle of the United States, after dark. And if there was a leak of light around a window shade the passing air raid warden (neighbor) in your neighborhood who wore a wardens arm band would beat at your door and say something like, Cover your crack of light Frances on your third bay window.

Quickly doing so, mom comforted my brother and me as she extinguished all lights but one heavily shaded twenty watt lamp. She would then turn out the last light, so we could raise the blind and look out and to see, all was dark, but safe in our huddled world, waiting for the sirens wailing of an, all is clear, in the middle of the United States, far, far, away from Pearl Harbor, Japan, Italy and Germany. Have you figured it out? Radio informed my neighbor, my neighbor informed me, then I confirmed it to the churches congregation, and a church member confirmed my message by listening to his radio for affirmation.

The deprivations that were endured by all of the families during the depression were magnified by the sacrifices they all had to welcome during World War II as rationing was handled by the government by issuing food stamps for basic staples, gasoline and shoes, to name a few. Unlike today, or since that time, has everything become important to the war effort and as no-one escaped the tentacles of controls as almost everything willingly went to the necessary war effort. Some of the enlistees got their first pair of socks and boots after going barefoot for years of the depression.

Some went to war, some never came home as the stars were honorably displayed in the windows of America’s homes announced a child or husband was in the service. The older boys of the neighborhood who looked after us enlisted and stars were proudly hung in the front windows of their parent’s homes. Those homes were visited by service representatives or telegrams announcing death had come to their loved ones.

I will never forget the day they visited our neighbor Robinson’s across the street. The star hung now with even greater honor as its color was changed announcing their full commitment and sacrifice had been made. It is tough to say, but sacrifice and tragedy kept us all together, not like today. Victory means sacrifice of all, causing winning. To those of us who experienced that time, it gave us a measuring stick to family life, something that later ‘me’ generations do not possess.

I was in bib-overalls, five years old and in the first grade when Pearl Harbor happened. I finished the third grade in the town of my birth when I had turned eight years old. Every spring my brother and our buddies would go to the garment factory and like a line of ant’s hauling big pasteboard boxes back to our side lawn where we built immense forts and played war against the Japanese and Germans. Bobby Deppy would ride his shiny Schwinn bike with a light on the front fender across the tracks to play with us. His dad owned the only movie theater in town which I recall cost only ten cents or eight empty soda bottles redemption at two cents a bottle at the time for the price of a nickel sack of popcorn and a ten cent kid ticket to the movies. The movie house was the scene of the other big happening when our entire third grade marched a block away from the school house to the movie house to see an epic Technicolor movie. That showing made an impression on me that I find to be still entrenched in my mind to this day.

Imagine seeing "Gone with the Wind when you were only seven or eight years old or even under fifty? I guess that’s why I named a southern Missourian’s, southern tall-kin, niece’s registered Maltese puppy, Scarlett" many years after viewing the movie’s special matinee showing that day.

My father didn’t pass the fiscal exam to enter the service during World War II. Holding down two or three part-time jobs, dad applied for a job as watch engineer on a swing shift at the city power generation plant, which we lived close to when he was hired. He had a body of steel and could cut a number nine wire with one hand with what they call, a small set of electric pliers which I still have to this day. His hard working young life had created his hernia which along with his two children at that time precluded his being drafted, a fact that almost took his life. The city power plant was on the other side of the junk yard from our apartment in a home down by the railroad tracks and by the feed mill. This is when I learned what a swing shift was all about. Dad got the job and continued his education in the power generation field by schooling himself and devouring information on the power industry and its engineering during his long shifts.

After we had moved from one side of Mr. Pigg’s house to the other on the mill side, a bigger move took us to a stand-alone house during the war in the same block of my birth on Walsh Boulevard and across the street from my Great Uncle Jim’s full granite house. From time to time I would go over to the Miller’s front porch and sit in the porch swing with Mornie who I always loved as a grandmother. Her name was given to her, when I was just three years old, as it was what I called her because I couldn’t say, Mrs. Miller. The Mornie, Mornie stuck for the rest of her life. Not too long after we had moved next door to my birthplace house, the two-story burnt to the ground.

My mother and father took the Miller family in since they had been so good to our family and we loved them as our own. After their basement was finished on their new home they returned to live in it while building its two story replacement above.

Believe it or not, the movies were our television and further planted the seed for my future when I saw that movie epic. My desire to be an actor was born in a movie house. Back then a movie house was called the movie show. A Saturday evening at the movie show consisted of a cartoon, a short ten minute novelty feature, another episode of a serial, previews of coming attractions and then the feature length movie.

In the spring of 1944 the entire third grade was marched up the street from the schoolhouse to the movie theater only a block away to see a famous movie matinee. My third grade school teacher just happened to be married to one of my Great Uncle’s sons who carried our family name. She was advanced at the time and looked forward to children experiencing history. At eight years of age I could not believe my eyes when I saw Atlanta burn in the movie epic, ‘Gone with the Wind.’ It was my first encounter with history and violence of the Civil War. To this day I could not understand why my cousin teacher thought a child the age that I was could comprehend any history lesson as strong as the one I had just experienced.

Believe me, I found the violence of the movie to be eye opening and one that I have not forgotten to this day. Every girl who experienced ‘Gone with the Wind’ treated their first boyfriends with the same Scarlett approach for the next ten years, to which I can attest for some of those.

Years later I found that to be advantageous when I turned fifteen, especially if I used a modified Clark Gable famous line, Frankly, I Don’t Give a Damn (place girls name here). There wasn’t a one that did not come back with the southern style accent line, "Oh Rhet, you’re so aggressive! To which I would reply, Scarlett, let me show you how aggressive." Her reply, censored. Things were looking up as the times seemed to become better even with all of the war effort sacrifices everyone was making. To us it seemed better since my father didn’t have to have two or more jobs to feed our family. He made bricks at the Vandalia Brick Plant and delivered groceries for my Great Uncle Mark’s grocery store before he got the job and shift work at the municipal power plant. My dad always moved forward no matter the economy from a work discipline and ethic that was instilled in me by example and by great communication. Walsh Boulevard is where I had my first encounter with a truly different accent other than pop Miller’s heavy German brogue. It was spoken by an eastern Pennsylvania man when I was seven years old.

The war effort brought Mr. Getz, originally from Pennsylvania, a power plant man-power recruiter, to meet with my dad. After several visits he persuaded my dad to become an assistant watch engineer for power plant duty supplying power to the war effort at the anhydrous ammonia plant twenty-seven miles away in Louisiana, Missouri on the Mississippi River. With a promise of finding a closer place to live, Mr. Getz was the reason for our moving that summer sixteen miles to the east where housing was available. We moved to Bowling Green, Missouri, only eleven miles west of the Louisiana, Missouri plant. This qualified the family car for a different gas rationing sticker letter that was placed on the window of our 1937 Ford two door car with a manifold heater that allowed more gas to be purchased due to the war effort vital job status.

The two door grey ’37 Ford without outside rear-view mirrors (remember this fact) he purchased was to commute the eleven miles to the power plant in Louisiana, Missouri. When I really knew who my dad was and I could see him for the first time in me was when I remember cutting it short.

Let’s Backup to that Pruning

I have been told I really didn’t talk much until I was three. By relating the next two stories it will dispel that old saying, why you can’t remember back that far, no one can. I could have been two but possibly three when I didn’t know anything to talk about until I understood fear and I learned about it when I got my first haircut at Mr. Branstedder’s barber shop. I felt my body being swooped up and saw my father’s face next to mine as he placed me on a special padded board that was laid across the arms of the barber chair. With my dad standing in front of me I felt a strip of paper go around my neck and then appearing from nowhere was a big striped cloth falling around my body. The room began to spin around as the chair turned swiftly and it showed me my golden wavy curly haired self and the barber, Mr. Branstedder’s said into the mirror, you don’t want to be this little girl in the mirror do you?

Spinning me back around was fun, but it was so I could keep an eye on my dad at all times, the snapping and clicking shears caused a flood of fleece around the barber chair floor. When he said I would look exactly like my dad, all I could see was dad’s premature receding hairline which meant nothing to me at the time. Upon completion of the clipping I then heard his special electric sheers climbing up my neck with each stroke. The room was dead quite as he brushed a sweet smelling talcum powder on my neck, it was just like when I watched him cut and brush powder my dad. I had never felt the feeling of cool air movement on my neck and ears before, or, until dad’s barber spun me around to look at myself in the mirror for the second time. Finally, there I was almost hairless, looking like an older man, looking like my dad, with amazingly short blonde, uh, short brown hair now with two big ears that I had not yet grown into.

My dimples were deeply embedded in each jaw. Sometimes seen to this day when I look in the mirror and I recall being like my dad, especially with his inherited hair line.

Bottom Line:

My hair was like this line looks from here to the bottom of the page.

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I know you can remember back to at least to age three by having a traumatic event happen in your life. I had seen my father step on the hoe head and cause the handle to go up into his hands. I was one of those kids that wanted to be just like dad at three years of age.