Beginnings

"One Hand On The Radio" (Bill Caddick & Pete Bond) is a song by Canadian singer, Aengus Finnan, and the name of this blog.  All my life I've had one hand on the radio, in fact or in mind.  And while nowadays it is usually through the computer and not radio, music often soundtracks my days.

My first store-bought record was a 78 by Dean Martin.  My mother bought it for me.  It was 1954 and the record was called "Sway."  The song still holds up but there is better, less "produced" Dean Martin –– my favorite, a 1963 album titled Dream With Dean.

1916 PACKAGING OF SUN-MAID 
RAISINS SHOWING LORRAINE
  COLLETT AS THE SUN-MAID GIRL

In 1954 I was eight years old and "Sway" brought rhythm into my life.  I had known about the song from our kitchen radio, a radio which in memory was cream colored and bakelite.  At some point I came to associate "Sway" with the Sun-Maid box of raisins in our kitchen; in particular, with the Sun-Maid raisin girl, who seemed perky and rhythmic herself.

Years later I came across an obituary about the real model for the Sun-Maid raisin girl, Lorraine Collett.  Here is an excerpt from a Wikipedia entry about her:

LORRAINE COLLETT
IN 1915

   Lorraine Collett was born to George Dexter
   Collett and Martha Elizabeth Falkenstein in 
   Kansas City, Missouri.  In 1915, Collett was 
   attending high school and working part-time
   as a seeder and packer for the Griffin &
   Skelley Fruit Packing Company in Fresno,
   California for $15 a week.  That May she 
   was spotted by Leroy Payne, one of the 
   executives of the raisin cooperative, while
   drying her curly brown hair and wearing her
   mother's red bonnet in the backyard of her 
   family's home.  She was hired to promote 
   the California Associated Raisin Co. by 
   handing out free samples at the Panama-
   Pacific Exposition and participating in an unusual promotion that had her 
   dropping raisins from an airplane flying over San Francisco.

Lorraine Collett was born in 1892 and died in 1983.  Collett, kitchen, radio, music –– all blend together and anchor something for me.