The weirdly wonderful Word Jazz: What kid would play a record with a guy crunching celery? A desperate one like me!

My parents had this weird record I loved playing when I was a kid, especially a track where the guy crunches on crackers and celery. 

I first listened to the album because I was desperate. With no screen to watch because we didn’t have a TV, my sister and I were usually starved for entertainment.

So when I couldn’t go outside exploring, I would search the house for treasures, often digging through our parents records looking for anything interesting. And nothing looked more interesting than the cover of “Word Jazz,” the most weirdly wonderful record I've played.

That was crazy cool.

Released in the 1950s, it features Ken Nordine speaking while jazz music plays, and most of the tracks did not interest me (especially since I have never liked jazz!) But “Hunger is From” has him sneaking into the kitchen for a midnight snack, something so simple even a kid could understand and enjoy. (You can listen to that track and see the cover of the album here.)

As I listened to him eat, I imagined going into our kitchen and finding my dream foods: Creamy Skippy peanut butter that I could slather on buttery Ritz crackers, a snack my friend's mom always made for us after school that was never offered in my house, because my mother only bought the oily “natural” peanut butter.

But why I really loved that record is because I loved hearing people tell stories.

My favorite memory of childhood, and still one of my favorite memories ever, was when my mother read my sister and I the entire Lord of the Rings series, starting with The Hobbit.

And I loved the experience of having pictures painted in my head by a human voice so much that I begged her every night to read more. And when the series was finally done, I began a lifelong quest for more stories.

In the house I found comic book records, the soundtrack for Disney's Alice in Wonderland, and even a recording of Peter and the Wolf.

On the radio I found some songs that quenched my thirst, and whenever they came on the radio I would plant myself next to one of the large speakers in the living room, sitting cross-legged with one ear against the speaker so I could be fully immersed in the stories the singers were telling on tracks like: “Rocky Raccoon,” by the Beatles, “El Paso” by Marty Robbins, or even “Steppin’ Out” by Joe Jackson.

But the best stories were on Saturdays, when a station in San Francisco would air old radio dramas like Gunsmoke and Suspense, though we could only get good reception in the car, so we would beg our mom to take us birding so we could sit and listen to them while she looked for birds.

Most of the week, though, while I waited for my mom to come home from work, it was just me and Ken, he eating celery and me dreaming of Ritz crackers with the “good” peanut butter, not the gritty “natural” stuff my mom bought.

Illustration by Dell Linney

Another escape I coveted as a kid without a television was the laundromat, which offered my version of Saturday morning cartoons: Watching my clothes drying.

Read more about that in this previous post: Requiem for a laundromat.