I was thinking tonight about the Monday Morning March.

Actually, to be specific, I was humming the Monday Morning March. Which I have been known to do from time to time when it pops randomly into my head. Which it does semi-regularly. It seems to be somewhere in permanent storage. I never claimed to understand my brain.

I intend to explain myself, don't worry.

When I was young, and I wore an onion on my belt, as was the fashion --

No, no, not really, but one thing I resent about aging, and about the speed at which information accelerates over the event horizon to vanish and be forgotten these days, is that more and more often I end up sounding like some doddering fool even though I'm not yet sixty.

Let's start over. When I was a child, a small child, local television stations still carried a fair bit of local television programming. Local TV programming was usually pretty amateurish, but it did have a certain charm. Baton Rouge was not a large or rich market, so it's possible local TV production, like local TV ads, lingered there for a lot longer than they did in, say, markets like New York City. (I know we were still getting a lot of cheesy local TV ads well into the 1990s, which seems pretty late.)

This was also the era where there were three television channels -- an ABC affiliate, an NBC affiliate, and a CBS affiliate, and my mother and grandparents spoke of ABC sometimes as if it were a johnny-come-lately. You could pick up one or two UHF channels, though they were usually spotty and usually PBS. If the weather was right and you got the little circular antenna just right and you stood on one foot, you could pick up a UHF channel from New Orleans, which was important, because that's how I got to see my first episodes of "Doctor Who."

Cable television came to Baton Rouge in my tween years. (And a particular family member of mine has been involved with Cablevision, which is now part of Cox Cable, off and on since the beginning.) This was a big deal because you could get Home Box Office, back when people still knew what those letters stood for, and watch movies. No one knew at the time that they were witnessing the beginning of the slow death of the movie theatre.

Anyway, channel 9 -- which was WAFB then and now, and was the first television station in Baton Rouge, by the way, and only the second in the entire state of Louisiana -- had a children's program in the mornings and afternoons, hosted by a man named Buckskin Bill. Bill Black was his right name, but I didn't learn that until I was a teenager.

I was the kind of child who is naturally suspicious of cheerfulness and treacle, especially when aimed at children. I find that the kind of adult who is always sunshine and rainbows to children either doesn't understand children very well, or has really dark secrets under the facade (you know, child molestation or something like that), or both. I felt that way when I was small, and I feel that way today. So I didn't have much use for Buckskin Bill even as a wee tot. However, in the afternoons, which also happened to be the time when I was at my grandmother's house after school waiting for my mom to come get me, he played Popeye and Warner Bros cartoons, which I did have a use for.

And sometimes I'd be there a little early to go out and wait for the bus and the morning version of the show would be on and it'd be a Monday, and I have to tell you, Buckskin Bill was onto something, because even as a child it was pretty clear there was some value to beginning your week with the Monday Morning March.

And the melody has stayed in my head all these years since.

When I wandered down this road of thought, and sat down to write this entry, my first thought was, "I am not going to be able to find a damned thing about this obscure local television figure on the web, much less the Monday Morning March."

But, despite various efforts by corrupt interests who keep trying to make the web into a useless pile of shit, we do still live in a wonderful era of information where you can find just about anything online, as long as you're prepared to do a little bit of looking. And as it turns out, in this case you don't even have to look very hard. Buckskin Bill has a fucking Wikipedia page. The Baton Rouge library has a Buckskin Bill archives collection.

It turns out that when you're on the air for thirty-five years, you become part of a lot of people's lives. When you're on the air for thirty-five years in a children's show, you impress onto a lot of young brains and they remember you fondly. Especially if you're a genuinely good person. My naturally suspicious mind wants, again, to think there must have been some skeletons in the man's closet, but if there were, no one knows about them. His history is basically a litany of good works. After television mutated past him in 1990, he taught at LSU, and served four terms on the school board. He married his college sweetheart back in 1952 and they were together until her death in 2017.

Even someone who is as morally repugnant as tradcath cosplayer Rod Dreher has love in his heart for Buckskin Bill. I won't link Dreher's article upon Black's death in 2018 (for one thing, it appeared in The American Conservative, and I have standards), but it's one of the few times I've ever seen Dreher be sincere about anything, and since I went to college concurrently with Dreher and had to occasionally encounter him at the student newspaper, I have unfortunately read a great deal of his shit over the years.

Oh, yes, the Monday Morning March. Almost forgot why I was here. Because YouTube clips sometimes have the lifespan of mayflies, I offer you not one but two. Actually, I have no recollection of the March ever going on at this length in the actual broadcasts -- it's in my head as a bit he only did for like thirty seconds -- but, you know, a minute or so will give you the idea.

The first clip is from 1985, so nearing the end of the show's run. The other is obviously much, much older. That one's worth a look, despite its poor quality (and the unrelated promotional materials the poster has tacked on in front, and the fact that the last half of it is a Little Rascals short), because in that one you get to hear some of Black's schtick. He was actually very straightforward in his approach -- he never talked down to kids. And not particularly saccharine; I think I just remember him that way because of my innate Daria-ness, which was always pretty strong.

Also, the Monday Morning March is properly the "Spirit of Freedom March," by Kent Cooper, and here is what everyone seems to agree is the actual album recording that Black used, the Cities Service Band of America conducted by Paul Lavalle.

And most of the comments under that post are Baton Rougeans saying "You can't fool us, this is the Monday Morning March."

I'm going to tell you something a little embarrassing. When I found those clips and played them, I found myself getting a little bit teary. No, I'm not kidding. I think I may be becoming a sentimental old bitch. And I've decided this entry warrants a brand-new topic tag for the collection.

Sometimes the past reaches out and, with no warning and no real reason, grabs you by the throat.