This story about the place that I called “The Box”, covers a large arc of time in my life from childhood to young adult (ca. 1963 to 1979). It begins looking through the lens of the naive little kid, who’s primary activities involved nothing more than playful imagination.
It winds up with a young man, looking at life with the same child-like satisfaction…but instead of toys and games, it’s a love of the study of music that drives him…making use of that same giddy enthusiasm from where those childhood dreams began.
Long before “The Box” came into being, there were many places in an earlier time in life, that had to be explored first. Only after those experiences, could this place that was so significant to me, play such a pivotal role in my life as a musician!
A Typical Neighborhood For Adults…A World Of Wonders For Kids
As a child, growing up in Hyde Park, NY, my family settled on top of a hill, on “Highland Road.” Our house was virtually at the center, of a neighborhood “circle.” In and around this locality, my friends and I had many places nearby to get together and do the things that kids like to do. We gave some of these places whimsical names.
Before There Was A Store…
Some of them were close to my own yard, like “The Radio Shack.” That’s right, I went to The Radio Shack before there was any store known as “Radio Shack.” Our Radio Shack was in a wooded area about 25 yards from the south-eastern edge of our property. It consisted of a felled tree, with an unusual half-circle like appendage that used to be one of its branches.
We pretended that this odd-shaped “thing” was an electrical wire and several us would sit on the tree trunk, and talk to “headquarters.” Where was that? Who Knows? We were just a bunch of goofy kids with over-active imaginations!
To The Hole, Lads, To “The Hole!”
Then, there was “The Hole.” It was just down the hill off the south-western side of our yard. You would follow a path through (of course) a wooded area, and that would lead you to an abandoned, dug out foundation for a house that “never was.” The Hole was a great place to play “Army” with our toy guns, or “Construction” with our Tonka Trucks. If I talked on the phone to my friend Gary Guido to plan our day, he might have said, ”We’ll meet in The Hole.” I lived on one side of it, and Gary, the other.
The Hudson River Psychiatric Center
Hopping on our bikes, we might take a slight detour, a little ways out of our locale to another of our favorite haunts, “The State Hospital.” We didn’t name that one. We just shortened its name bit. I mean, what kid wants to say, “Let’s go to The Hudson River Psychiatric Center!” This place was a massive complex for the mentally-challenged, and many of the residents who were deemed “harmless”, would walk about the grounds freely. It was a fascinating and historic place – here’s more about it from Wikipedia .
The State Hospital was a wonderful bike-riding world for us guys and our hyper-active lifestyles. Occasionally, we’d stop and chat with the “more-friendly” patients. There was “John, The Patient”, who could ramble on a single subject for the better part of…well, forever.
Also, we be-friended “Roy, The Patient” who we observed to be a “slow-walker.” Funny thing, Roy’s favorite expression was, “That guy’s too slow!” One day he looked at me, pointing out one of my friends riding nearby on his bike and said, “Hey kid, look at that kid on his bike – He’s too slow!” Then how he laughed! The unlit cigarette dangling from his lips would be bobbing up and down with each successive guffaw.
If it appears that at times we were being cruel to these old men, let me take this moment to apologize for my, and my other friends’ transgressions…but we lived in very different times, where there was little or no talk about sensitivity toward the mentally ill. Our only defense was that we really were just a bunch of dopey little kids, with slow-growing brains to boot!
The State Hospital’s Wonders…From Mountains To Cocktail Lounges
The State Hospital had some “subsets” of places for us to hang out as well. There was “The Coal Pile.” It was a 50-foot mountain of coal for the ancient trains that used to make deliveries to the Hospital. The coals looked exactly like “charcoal briquettes.” To show our “toughness” we would climb “Coal Mountain” from time to time because it was there! You would climb up 6 feet, slide down 4 feet, climb up 10 feet, slide down 6 feet, and in about ten minutes you would reach the top with your clothes and hands all covered in soot! I know…not too smart, but it was the ’60’s, and the expression, “Environmentally sensitive” was not in the vernacular. There were no signs or fences to keep us away, and thus Stupidity always won the day!
On a hot day, there was no place better to “invade” than “The American Legion” (also located on The Hospital grounds). They had a pool table, a soda machine, and even a bartender who sold us Chips, Slim Jims, and Beer Nuts (but not the beer, of course!).
For whatever reason, the old men drinking at the bar, and the bartender himself never seemed to get annoyed at us “little punks”, and a peaceful co-existence blossomed, driven by the capitalistic exchange of legal tender (in the form of nickels and dimes) for substantial amounts of junk food.
Dirt, Junk Cars, And Dumb Kids
Back in our neighborhood, we had “The Dirt Road.” My guess is that it was a failed project to join the two major routes of “9” and “9G” which ran through the Hyde Park/Poughkeepsie, NY area. In one section of The Dirt Road, there was a place where people abandoned their old, broken-down cars.
We didn’t have or even need video games like Grand Theft Auto. If there were four of us guys, we each had a car to himself to “drive” to wherever our imaginations would take us that day! Again, probably not the safest activity, but fun always superseded caution, such as thinking twice about the consequences of what we were doing in the moment!
Tadpoles, Turtles And Huckleberry Filth
Another place of great childhood recreation was “The Pond.” It was located in a wooded area off (I kid you NOT!) “Pond Road.” If my childhood could be broken down into real-life episodes of “Leave It To Beaver”, The Pond would be in quite a few of them. Of course, me and my friends built a raft! Of course, we set it to sail on The Pond! Of course, it capsized, leaving us to swim to shore in the scummy water! And furthermore…we (of course) went home to our various parents, wet and smelly, only to get the “You could’ve drown,” lecture!
My most poignant memory of The Pond was going there with my older sister, Dianna, with our pet turtles in tow (“Herman” and “Scott”). Our parents convinced us that they would be happier “in the wild.” With that, each of us held our respective turtle close, gave them a little speech about how much we would miss them, gave them each a kiss ( blecch!), and released them to the sanctuary of The Pond. It’s remembering moments like this, when I miss Dianna the most!
A Cellar Full Of Kids
Meanwhile, back at the Belding Homestead, we had “The Basement.” Of course, my friends called it, “Jeff’s Basement.” During my childhood, The Basement was like a clubhouse for me and “my gang.” It had cabinets full of toys and games: G.I. Joe, Operation Moon Base, The Mystery Spaceship, The Great Garloo, Astro Base, Tric-Trac, Motoriffic, Green Ghost, Bash, Tipit, Clean Sweep…okay, I think you get the idea.
There was a pool table and a ping-pong table, a dart board, slot car racing, not to mention an “Airline” (Montgomery Ward) Stereo “Console.” Many a childhood moment and hour was spent there. Whether on my own or with my buds, there was always a new world to create, or a friendly (sometimes…unfriendly?) table top game tournament to take on.
As time marched on, and I grew older, The Basement went through many changes. In my teenage years, it became a haven of musical creativity for me and my many musical cronies from this neighborhood and elsewhere.
The Basement – From Wonderland To Workplace
When I came home from music school (in my twenty-something’s), The Basement had become the new location of my father’s business, “Belding Typesetting”, and I became the company’s first employee. The Basement and our garage became the home of three huge, imposing Linotype Machines, and the delightful smell of molten lead (the stuff that was molded into words on a page) wafted through The Basement’s air.
A half year later, my dad expanded the business to include “Cold Type.” Now, books for the first time since Gutenberg’s day, could be printed on a computer, which took up our entire laundry room! The process was full of glitches, and it would still be many years before the Linotype (books printed on lead slugs, one line at a time) would become obsolete. Dad was always thinking way ahead of the curve! I thought that the stress of our “Basement Business” might destroy him, but he was far too strong to let it sink him down!
Some of these Cold Type books required illustrations in the form of taking a picture that needed to be developed in a dark room. Digital photography was in its infancy, and so my father set to work building a dark room in a far back corner of The Basement. The ping-pong table had to be sacrificed to make way for this project.
My dad and grandfather built our house from the ground-up before I was born. They had very little professional help to build this childhood home of ours. Apparently, Dad read a book entitled, “How To Build A House”, and the rest is history. That being said, building a little darkroom in The Basement was a walk in the park for him!
And so, a new “place” came into being in The Basement. “The Box” was born. As a darkroom, it became a valuable asset in the “construction” of these “new-fangled” computer-generated books.
Jeff, The Ace Compositor – Jeff, The Music Meister
During this time period (ca. 1978), I had each foot in a different world. For one thing, I worked part-time as an Ace Compositor in the Linotype division of the business. You might well ask, “What does an Ace Compositor do?” Well, we mostly get covered in ink from running “proof presses” and moving heavy “galleys” of lead type from place to place. A normal-sized Dell, Danielle Steele romantic novel could take up to 80 of these galleys (or trays of type) and weigh over a thousand pounds!
for the next delivery
Transporting them to the publishing company (Western Publishing in Poughkeepsie, NY) for final printing was a whole crazy operation in itself! My buddy, Bernie Ritters was the driver, and I rode shotgun, in a ’63 Ford Station Wagon full of galleys of pages of the latest Dell Book.
In between my duties as an Ace Compositor, I gave music lessons upstairs in an “abandoned” bedroom in a far corner of the house. During this time, I was still kind of bitter about music school and sometimes second-guessing if my decision to abandon it was the right thing to do.
I wouldn’t go as far as to call it “wasted time”, since I learned a great deal about music theory, history, and even became an “okay” piano player out of the experience. I just felt like I had been treated insensitively by various “powers that be”, and to continue on would have been like running against a straight-line wind. It’s a long, sad story that I should save for another day.
For now, I was thankful to have students to teach, which was just as much of a great training ground for my own musical knowledge. I also had a stellar musical mentor in my banjo instructor, Roger Sprung, guiding my musical path both in music theory and banjo pedagogy (that may be the first time in history, that those two words have been juxtaposed!).
Come FORWARD! – Jeff Enters “The Box!”
In a rather short period of time, computer imaging greatly improved, and the day came when the darkroom (from hereafter to be known as “The Box”) was deemed obsolete. On that fateful day, my father offered it to me as a place to teach out of. Frankly, I had virtually never gone into “The Box”, since it hadn’t been on my duty roster with the company to use it.
Going “in” for the first time was thrilling, to say the least! It truly was an empty box (all the darkroom and camera equipment had been moved out). It was about 12’ by 12’, with shelving all around and beautiful ( to me, tacky to others) paneling on all sides of the square. The Box had a “lid” on it as well, which made it soundproof enough to make music without much “interference” to or from the various activities going on in the rest of The Basement.
I immediately moved my music “stuff-of-the-trade” as well as myself into my new “cube-icle” (that’s a joke…a very small joke). My students now had to be redirected to their new studio, The Box. Fortunately, there were other employees around to guide them to their new location for Jeff’s “College of Musical Knowledge.”
A Tantalizing Location For Endless Inspiration
As the days and months went by, I found myself spending more and more hours in The Box. It was like my own little “Fortress of Solitude.” I had a cheesey-old Hohner electric piano leftover from my “Stockade” days, to practice keyboard parts for our latest band, “Synergy.”
I made my own back-up tracks to practice my guitar improvisation skills with. Any new idea, or some crazy new chord, or bonkers new scale, was written down, catalogued and practiced.
One memorable moment was having a practice with the “string section” members of our band, “Synergy” – Mike Persely on guitar, Pete Conklin on bass, and myself also on guitar. That evening, we started off with an impromptu version of “Straight, No Chaser” by Thelonious Monk.
I was fortunate to have my boom box (not to be confused with The Box) up and recording to capture this magical moment. I think it shows that The Box was not only a fun place to be, but it had pretty good acoustics as well!
Walk Through The Door…Create Some More
The Box was also the place where my banjo tune “Reverie” was born. Over the course of one long evening, just me, my banjo, and a crummy boom box knocked off one of my best compositions EVER! You can read that story under the title of, “Winning A Banjo Contest” (Category – My Life As A Musician).
One day, a new gadget arrived in the mail that would become the replacement of the old boom box. It was a multi-track cassette recorder under the brand name of “Cutec.” As I recall, Gary Guido and I ordered one for each of us, thus in so doing, saved some dough on the overall cost of these machines.
There I WAS! In The Basement of all my childhood toys, dreams, and schemes! I was “all grown up”, but when I opened up that 4-track recorder, set it on the shelf in The Box (it fit perfectly, by the way!), I was feeling the same childhood glee that I experienced in building my many kid-worlds of “make-believe” back in the day!
I didn’t even bother to read any of the instructions, initially. I saw that it had four inputs to plug “something” into, and four sets of identical controls for each input. I was just itching to try to “throw something down” that involved four instruments of some sort or another! I didn’t care about “quality”, I just needed to see what this beast was capable of doing.
I chose the traditional tune of “Devil’s Dream” for my first “Cutec Project.” I started out with a banjo melody, and then played some banjo back-up chords to have behind a guitar solo. For my second track, I added another banjo playing harmony. I listened back to the two parts. Sure, the harmony wasn’t perfect by any stretch, but that didn’t matter!
I Waited Too Long For This…
I danced for joy (musta looked like an idiot!) hearing these two banjos interacting, realizing that for the first time in my life how easy it was going to be to make my own multi-track recordings! I continued to add a guitar and a bass to tracks 3 and 4, and my very first “Cutec Project” was complete in practically the time it took to play the piece four times in a row! So here it is – Cutec Project #1, “Devil’s Dream”, complete with all its flaws and mistakes – and I am so thankful that this recording that brought me so much joy is still with me to this very day!
I was so excited during the recording process that I dropped my guitar pick…can you tell where?
Even better, this first home-grown recording took place in The Box – that weird little room in “Jeff’s Basement” where I gained mountains of new musical knowledge through teaching, practicing, contemplating, composing, studying theory, and just having even more fun than the little kid who used to be building worlds of G.I. Joe adventures and Moon Bases. My life is all the richer, thanks to this little 12’ by 12’ room, a glorious gift from my dad, Bob Belding – THE BOX!!!
