Hey, Art:

One of the things I regret about this site is that we can't post photographs in our comments. Maybe I'll e-mail a couple to you... one of the brass propellor and the other of the wheel of the Silver Queen. You can still pick up a bag of Okee Doke cheese covered popcorn in the Midwest. Every time I come home, it's one of the first things I look for.

As for the Silver Queen, Roy Harris did a marvelous recording of the song on one of his early albums. Unfortunately, the track skips on my record, and I've never been able to get a replacement. He does it with a concertina and a very English, almost music hall arrangement with some twittery chickies singing along on the chorus.
It is very evocative of the second World War as felt by those who experienced it in Britain. I marvel at music. Someone can take a song that is specific to a small town in southern Wisconsin, and transform it into a song that evokes a completely different landscape and culture.

One of the verses in the song refers to a flag hanging in a front room window. Some folks that drop by here can remember when the living room was called the front room, because it was almost always at the front of the house. During the Second World War, there were three differently colored stars. They were small, mounted on a wooden stick with tassles on the bottom. Or, at least that's how I remember them. A blue star meant that your son or daughter was in the service, a silver star that they'd been wounded in action, and a Gold Star that they had been killed in the line of duty.

I was born in 1935, not knowing at the time that my home town of Janesville celebrated it's 100th anniversary in that year. I came home to visit in 1985, and they had a big parade down Milwaukee Street, celebrating Janesville's 150th anniversary. It was all small town stuff, but when I saw a flat bed truck coming down the street, I was overwhelmed with emotion. Sitting proudly erect in folding chairs on the truck bed, waving small American flags were several elderly women. The banners on the truck said it all: Gold Star Mothers. Forty years had passed since the end of the second World War, but the pain and loss was still fresh in the faces of the women. Unlike the other floats that were greeted with huzzaws and jokes, there was only scattered applause, with many people like myself too overcome by the poignancy of the moment to do anything but stand there in silence.

Thanks for dropping by, Singer's Knight... don't make a stranger of yourself.

Jerry