In God we trust_ all others pay cash - Jean Shepherd [17]
“Who’s that little chatterbox …?
The one with curly golden locks….
Who do I see …
It’s Little Orphan Annie.”
Ah, they don’t write tunes like that any more. There was one particularly brilliant line that dealt with Sandy, Little Orphan Annie’s airedale sidekick. Who can forget it?
Arf goes Sandy.
I think it was Sandy more than anyone else that drew me to the Little Orphan Annie radio program. Dogs in our neighborhood never went “Arf.” And they certainly were a lot of things, but never faithful.
Little Orphan Annie lived in this great place called Tompkins Corners. There were people called Joe Corntassle and Uncle. They never mentioned the poolroom. There were no stockyards or fistfights. Or drunks sleeping in doorways in good old Tompkins Corners. Orphan Annie and Sandy and Joe Corntassle were always out chasing pirates or trapping smugglers, neither of which we ever had in Indiana as far as I knew. We had plenty of hubcap stealers and once even a guy who stole a lawn. But no pirates. At least they didn’t call them that.
She also had this friend named The Asp, who whenever she was really in a tight spot would just show up and cut everybody’s head off. I figured that if there was anything a kid of seven needed it was somebody named The Asp. Especially in our neighborhood. He wore a towel around his head.
Immediately after the nightly adventure, which usually took place near the headwaters of the dreaded Orinoco, on would come a guy named Pierre André, the definitive radio announcer.
“FELLAS AND GALS. GET SET FOR A MEETING OF THE LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE SECRET CIRCLE!”
His voice boomed out of the Crosley like some monster, maniacal pipe organ played by the Devil himself. Vibrant, urgent, dynamic, commanding. Pierre André. I have long had a suspicion that an entire generation of Americans grew up feeling inferior to just the names of the guys on the radio. Pierre André. Harlow Wilcox. Vincent Pelletier. Truman Bradley. Westbrook Van Voorhees. André Baruch. Norman Brokenshire. There wasn’t a Charlie Shmidlap in the lot. Poor little Charlie crouching next to his radio—a born Right Fielder. Playing right field all of his life, knee-deep in weeds, waiting for a flyball that never comes and more than half afraid that one day they will hit one in his direction.
“OKAY, KIDS. TIME TO GET OUT YOUR SECRET DECODER PIN. TIME FOR ANOTHER SECRET MESSAGE DIRECT FROM LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE TO MEMBERS OF THE LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE SECRET CIRCLE.”
I got no pin. A member of an Out Group at the age of seven. And the worst kind of an Out Group. I am living in a non-Ovaltine-drinking neighborhood.
“ALL RIGHT. SET YOUR PINS TO B-7. SEVEN … TWENTY-TWO … NINETEEN … EIGHT … FORTY-NINE … SIX … THIRTEEN … THREE!… TWENTY-TWO … ONE … FOUR … NINETEEN.”
Pierre André could get more out of just numbers than Orson Welles was able to squeeze out of King Lear.
“FOURTEEN … NINE … THIRTY-TWO. OKAY, FELLAS AND GALS, OVER AND OUT.”
Then—silence. The show was over and you had a sinister feeling that out there in the darkness all over the country there were millions of kids—decoding. And all I could do was to go out into the kitchen where my mother was cooking supper and knock together a salami sandwich. And plot. Somewhere kids were getting the real truth from Orphan Annie. The message. And I had no pin. I lived in an Oatmeal-eating family and listened to an Ovaltine radio show. To get into the Little Orphan Annie Secret Circle you had to send in the silver inner seal from a can of what Pierre André called “that rich chocolate-flavored drink that all the kids love.” I had never even seen an Ovaltine can in my life.
But as the old truism goes, every man has his chance, and when yours comes you had better grab it. They do not make appointments for the next day. One day while I am foraging my way home from school, coming down one of my favorite alleys, knee-deep in garbage and the thrown-out effluvia of kitchen life, there occurred an incident which forever changed