Zat You Santa Claus

from the Granada Hills (pardon the expression) Charter School :)
My pro-union background prejudice aside for charter's-it looks like a great place.

Gifts I'm preparin'
For some Christmas sharin'
But I pause because
Hangin' my stockin'
I can hear a knockin'
'Zat you, Santa Claus
Sure is dark out
Not the slighest spark out
Pardon my clackin' jaws
Uh, who there
Who is it
Uh, stoppin' for a visit
'Zat you, Santa Claus
Are you bringin' a present for me
Something pleasantly pleasant for me
That's what I've been waitin' for
Would you mind slippin' it under the door
Four winds are howlin'
Or maybe that be growlin'
My legs feel like straws
Oh my, my, me, my
Kindly would you reply
'Zat you, Santa Claus
Yeah
Oh hangin' my stockin'
I can hear a knockin'
'Zat you, Santa Claus
Yeah, say now
Hey there, who is it
Stoppin' for a visit
'Zat you, Santa Claus
Whoa there Santa you gave me a scare
Now stop teasin' 'cause I know you're there
We don't believe in no goblins today
But I can't explain why I'm shakin' this way
Well I see old Santa in the keyhole
I'll give to the cause
One peek and I'll try there
Uh-oh there's an eye there
'Zat you, Santa Claus
Please, please
I pity my knees
Say that's you Santa Claus
That's him alright

Christmas Night In Harlem

The Armstrong audio combined with images of Harlem from Google images hosted from Life Magazine Three different events are highlighted:

from 1938 scenes from photographer Hansel Mieth, from 1953 a Harlem Globetrotter game photographed by J. R. Eyerman, and from 1945 Adam Clayton Powell Jr.'s marriage to Hazel Scott, photographed by Sam Shere

lyrics (changed from the original racist ones)

Every gal strutting with her beau
Through the streets covered white with snow
Happy smiles everywhere you go
Christmas night in Harlem
People all feeling mighty good
In that good old neighborhood
Here and now be it understood
Christmas night in Harlem
Oh, Everyone is gonna sit up
Until after three
Everyone be all lit up
Like a Christmas tree
Come on now every Jane and Joe
Greet your sweet underneath the mistletoe
With a kiss and a hi-de-ho
Christmas night in Harlem
Instrumental Break
Everyone is gonna sit up
Until after three
Everyone be all lit up
Like a Christmas tree
Come on now every Jane and Joe
Greet your sweet neath the mistletoe
With a kiss and a hi-de-ho
Christmas night in Harlem

Cool Yule

From Coney Island to The Sunset Strip
Somebody's gonna make a happy trip
Tonight, while the moon is bright
He's gonna have a bag of crazy toys
To give the groanies of the boys and girls
So dig, Santa comes on big
He'll come a callin' when the snows the most
When all you cats are sleepin' warm as toast
And you gonna flip when Old Saint Nick
Takes a lick on the peppermint stick
He'll come a flyin' from a higher place
And fill the stocking by the fire place
So you'll, have a yule that's cool
-Instrumental Jazz Break-
Yeah, from Coney Island to The Sunset Strip
Somebody's gonna make a happy trip
Tonight, while the moon is bright
He's gonna have a bag of crazy toys
To give the groanies of the boys and girls
So dig, Santa comes on big
He'll come a callin' when the snows the most
When all you cats are sleepin' warm as toast
And you gonna flip when the Old Saint Nick
Takes a lick on the peppernint stick
He'll come a flyin' from a higher place
And fill the stocking by the fire place
So you'll, have a yule that's cool
Have a yule that's cool
Yeah, cool yule

Louis Armstrong: The Louis Armstrong House In Queens

Louis Armstrong House
34-56 107th Street
Corona, NY 11368
Guided 40-minute tours start every hour on the hour (last tour at 4pm).
Closed on all Mondays and the following Holidays: Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. ADMISSION Adults: $8 Seniors, students, and children: $6 Group rate (eight people or more): $6 Current Members: Free
Many of the pictures of the house (at the beginning of the slide show come from the excellent nyc site the bridge and tunnel club
His wife Lil Hardin is also pictured. The music: One of the all time classics , "April In Paris, with Ella Fitzgerald accompanying Louie.
lyrics by Yip Harburg

I never knew the charm of spring
I never met it face to face
I never knew my heart could sing
I never missed a warm embrace
Till April in Paris, chestnuts in blossom
Holiday tables under the trees
April in Paris, this is a feeling
That no one can ever reprise
I never knew the charm of spring
I never met it face to face
I never knew my heart could sing
I never missed a warm embrace
Till April in Paris
Whom can I run to
What have you done to my heart

About the Louis Armstrong House from a nytimes article from 11/6/07

Louis Armstrong, the acclaimed jazz trumpeter and vocalist, bought a house in Corona, Queens, with his wife, Lucille, in 1943. He lived there until his death in 1971. The house was designated a national historic landmark in 1977 and a city landmark in 1983, the year Lucille Armstrong died. In 1986, the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation, which she created, donated the house to New York City and made arrangements for Queens College to maintain it.
But it would take nearly two decades before the house, at 34-56 107th Street, opened to the public. In 1996, the college, which also administers the Louis Armstrong archives, entered into a 20-year agreement with Armstrong’s estate and the city to operate the house as a museum and study center. The Louis Armstrong House Museum finally opened on Oct. 15, 2003.
Louis Armstrong House MuseumThe Armstrong kitchen.
Even so, the house museum is quite cramped. It can only accommodate two groups of 10 visitors at a time; larger numbers of visitors cannot be accommodated.
To address the situation, the state gave Queens College, a part of the City University of New York, $5 million to start design and construction of a visitors center, on an empty lot across the street from the house. In July, the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs awarded an additional $5 million to the visitors center. The center is to be completed by 2010.
Last week, after a national search, CUNY officials announced the selection of Caples Jefferson Architects to design the new visitors center. The firm, which is based in Manhattan and has a staff of 10, was founded in 1987. Its two principals — Sara Elizabeth Caples and her husband, Everardo Agosto Jefferson — have worked on other sites in New York City, including the Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn and Queens Theater in the Park.
Louis Armstrong HouseThe empty lot across from the museum will become a visitors center.
“You just have to listen to Louis Armstrong’s music to know why we’re so excited to work on a museum about him,” Ms. Caples said in a phone interview this week. “He’s the mother lode for so many different musical genres. That’s very awe-inspiring for us: the challenge of designing the building to embody the music.”
The neighborhood mostly consists of two- and three-story buildings, and Ms. Caples said her firm intended to be “quite respectful” of that context.
The visitors center will house exhibition space, Armstrong’s archival collection and space for jazz concerts and lectures.
“Louis Armstrong was not only a composer,” Ms. Caples said. “He couldn’t stop creating. When he wasn’t playing and composing, he was creating collages, writing novels and letters, recording music and conversations going on in his house. There’s an incredibly rich offering of things to exhibit.”
The new visitors center will be just 8,000 to 10,000 square feet, Ms. Caples said, “so part of the the challenge for us is to have the space work efficiently and do many things.”

Louis Armstrong 2

A foreign language version of a youtube clip of Louis playing in Paris Blues, (it had better resolution than the English one) It's titled, "Battle Royal"
Some biographical information on Louie from satchmo.net

Louis Armstrong was born in a poor section of New Orleans known as “the Battlefield” on August 4, 1901. By the time of his death in 1971, the man known around the world as Satchmo was widely recognized as a founding father of jazz – a uniquely American art form. His influence, as an artist and cultural icon, is universal, unmatched, and very much alive today.
Louis Armstrong’s achievements are remarkable. During his career, he:
* developed a way of playing jazz, as an instrumentalist and a vocalist, which has had an impact on all musicians to follow;
* recorded hit songs for five decades, and his music is still heard today on television and radio and in films;
* wrote two autobiographies, more than ten magazine articles, hundreds of pages of memoirs, and thousands of letters;
* appeared in over 30 films as a gifted actor with superb comic timing and an unabashed joy of life;
* composed dozens of songs that have become jazz standards;
* performed an average of 300 concerts each year, with his frequent tours to all parts of the world earning him the nickname “Ambassador Satch”; and
* became one of the first great celebrities of the twentieth century.
Through the years, Louis entertained millions, from heads of state and royalty to the kids on his stoop in Corona. Despite his fame, he lived a simple life in a working-class neighborhood. To this day, everyone loves Satchmo – just the mention of his name makes people smile.

Louis Armstrong

The trailer from the 1961 film, Paris Blues.

Paris Blues is a 1961 American feature film. It stars Sidney Poitier as expatriate jazz musician Eddie Cook, and Paul Newman as trombone-playing Ram Bowen romance two vacationing American tourists: Connie Lampson (Diahann Carroll) and Lillian Corning (Joanne Woodward). Also featured is Louis Armstrong. The film was produced by Sam Shaw and directed by Martin Ritt.

Black History Coloring Pages: Louis Armstrong

The Harlem Rens: Part 1

The cartoon images from the slide show come from Patrick Reynold's great collection
of New York City history called the Big Apple Almanac
The music is "Drop Me Off In Harlem" played by Louis Armstrong
The story of the Harlem Rens comes from black fives.com

In 1923, basketball manager Robert "Bob" Douglas made a deal with Harlem real estate developer William Roach, the owner of the new Renaissance Ballroom and Casino. Douglas owned and managed an all-black basketball team called the Spartan Braves, which was a leading contender for the black national championship title. But his basketball club had no home court. The Renaissance Ballroom, with its perfect location in the center of Harlem, its spacious floor, and its balcony seating that looked down from above, would be the ideal venue. Douglas asked Roach if the Spartans could play their home games at his ballroom in return for changing the name of the team to the "New York Renaissance" in order to promote the dance hall far and wide.
After some negotiating, Roach agreed. Douglas, now armed with a permanent home court, next introduced full-season player contracts to lock in his players, and the Big "R" Five became America's first all-black, black-owned, fully professional basketball team. The "Rens" attracted the best Negro talent in basketball. The team's original lineup included future Basketball Hall of Famers Clarence "Fats" Jenkins and James "Pappy" Ricks, as well as Frank "Strangler" Forbes and Leon Monde. All four of these men also played professional baseball in the Negro Leagues.
By 1924-25 the "Rens" had won the first of many Colored Basketball World Championships and thereafter proceeded to dominate not just black basketball, but all of basketball for the next 25 years. During that period, the Rens routinely beat white national champion basketball teams like the Original Celtics, the Philadelphia SPHAS, and the Indianapolis Kautskys. The irony is that the leagues in which these teams played did not allow African American players or teams to join.
That fact didn't stop Douglas and his Rens. They focused on winning, which they did by pioneering the motion offense, their trademark style of play that featured crisp passing, movement without the ball, disciplined shooting, and tenacious defense. In one stretch during the 1932-33 season, the Renaissance won 88 straight games in 86 days. That 1933 team, which included Willie Smith, Zach Clayton, and Charles "Tarzan" Cooper, was inducted as a unit into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1963.
The peak of the Rens fame and success came in 1939 when they won the first ever World Pro Basketball Tournament, an event sponsored by the Chicago Herald-American, a leading newspaper. The Rens, one of only two all-black entries in the 12-team invitation-only pool, beat the all-white Oshkosh All-Stars of the racially segregated National Basketball League (a forerunner to the NBA) in the title game. The Rens 1938-39 championship lineup included legendary stars John "Boy Wonder" Isaacs and William "Pop" Gates, as well as Cooper and Jenkins (Jenkins by then had been playing pro basketball for over 25 years).
Winning the inaugural World Professional Basketball Championship title opened a lot of eyes, and soon afterwards a lot of doors began to open. By the late 1940s the racial barriers to which pro basketball leagues previously had clung to so vigorously began to fall. In 1948 the National Basketball League invited the New York Rens to take over the Dayton franchise, thus making the Rens (now called the Dayton Rens) the first all-black basketball team to join a professional league.
New York Rens merchandise
From 1923 to 1948, the Rens won 2,588 of 3,117 games - a staggering winning percentage of 83% sustained over a 25-year period! By comparison, the combined winning percentage of the Chicago Bulls, the Boston Celtics, and the UCLA Bruins in their best dynasty years only reaches 76%, and their combined all-time winning percentage isn't even 60%! To compare further, the Boston Celtics took 65 seasons to win that many games!
In 1972, Rens owner Bob Douglas became the first African American enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame as an individual, in honor of his major contributions to the sport. Cooper and Gates followed, in 1977 and in 1989, respectively.
But that is where the Rens march to the Hall of Fame abruptly halted. Temporarily, we hope, because there are many other New York Rens players who deserve to be enshrined there. These include John Isaacs, Clarence Jenkins, William "Puggy" Bell, and Zach Clayton. (By the way, the number of Original Celtics players enshrined in the Hall of Fame, a team the Rens beat frequently, is far greater than the mere three Renaissance team members currently inducted.)
Through ever increasing exposure, advocacy, and activism on the part of journalists, historians, authors, family members, licensees, retailers, current and former athletes, entertainers, and others, the voting members of the Hall of Fame enshrinement committees will eventually become conscious enough to properly embrace this history.

John Brown

A slide show of various images of John Brown as well as historic sites across the nation devoted to him. Louis Armstrong accompaniment.
A biography from the Kansas Historical Association

John Brown: May 9, 1800 - December 2, 1859, Of all the characters that played significant roles on the Kansas stage during the drama that was Bleeding Kansas, none left a legacy that compares to the controversial abolitionist, John Brown. Born in Connecticut in 1800, "Old" John Brown was only fifty-five years old when he followed his sons to Kansas just as the struggle for control of the territory was taking shape. The family settled in rural Franklin County, just southwest of Osawatomie, the home of the Rev. Samuel and Florella Adair, Brown's half-sister.
John Brown absorbed a deep hatred for the institution of slavery early in life, eventually dedicated his life to its eradication, and quickly made his presence known during the Kansas struggle. He was involved in or responsible for the "Wakarusa war" at Lawrence, the Pottawatomie Massacre, the battles of Black Jack and Osawatomie, and the liberation of dozens of slaves from nearby Missouri.
After leaving Kansas for the last time early in 1859, the crusade continued; Brown, with several of his sons and other followers, planned and conducted the ill-fated raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. He was tried and convicted on conspiracy, treason, and murder charges stemming from this incident and was executed on December 2, 1859.
This almost mythic figure in the history of Kansas and the nation still elicits emotional reactions from students, scholars, and the general population, and history has not always been kind to this complex personality. To some of his contemporaries, Brown was a maniacal, bloodthirsty old fanatic. To many others, black and white, he was a martyred saint. He was "a moral Genius," according to a prominent late-nineteenth-century Kansan, whose life and death "brought about the abolition of slave labor years before" it would have otherwise occurred. "No man whose name appears in the annals of Kansas can begin to stand beside John Brown."

from the Ohio Historical Association

In 1844, abolitionist John Brown, soon to win fame in Kansas and at Harper's Ferry, moved into a two-room cottage across the street from the Perkins Mansion. He remained there while working with Simon Perkins, Jr., in the wool trade. Brown moved on and the house was used for other activities, but his name has remained associated with it for over a century.
John Brown was born in Torrington, Connecticut on May 9, 1800 and moved to the Western Reserve with his family in 1805. He grew up in Hudson and there he learned how to be a tanner or leather maker. He married his first wife, Dianthe Lusk, in Hudson.
Afterward, he moved to Pennsylvania, but his tannery there did not succeed. His first wife, Dianthe, died there and the widowed John married Mary Ann Day. He and Mary moved to Franklin Mills where John entered into a partnership with Zenas B. Kent in 1835, with the idea of building a tannery along the banks of the Cuyahoga River.
Unfortunately, John Brown and Zenas Kent did not have a good partnership, and eventually they stopped doing business together. Around this same time, though, a number of investors planned to start a new company, the Franklin Land Company, with the goal of turning Franklin Mills into a major industrial city. The idea was to raise silk worms and create an American silk industry. After all, the silk worms' major food source, the mulberry tree, grew extremely well here. (Later, of course, they would discover that silk worms do not thrive in cold Ohio winters.) Then other industries would follow and the economy would boom.
In any case, John Brown believed that real estate in Franklin Mills was going to be extremely valuable, and that by investing early, he would end up a wealthy man. Brown borrowed large sums of money, bought over 95 acres of land, and waited for his investment to pay off.
Instead, in 1837, the entire nation was caught up in an economic crisis. Franklin Mills never developed into a major industrial metropolis, and John Brown was driven to bankruptcy. Eventually, Brown would leave Franklin Mills, returning to Hudson, then Richfield.
He switched his career from tanning leather to raising sheep. While at Richfield, he was offered employment by Simon Perkins of Akron and moved his family there. In Akron, Brown formed a partnership with Simon Perkins. Representing the firm of Perkins and Brown, he went to Massachusetts to try and sell Western Reserve wool. The venture was soon in trouble, and Brown traveled to Europe to try and salvage the business. He failed, Perkins fired him, and John and his wife Mary moved to the Adirondack Mountains in New York, building a farm in the hamlet of North Elba.
Eventually, Brown would end up involved in a bloody conflict in Kansas Territory between those who hated slavery and those who favored it. Brown began using violence to reach his goal, which led him to the infamous slaughter of pro-slavery advocates at Osawatomie. There is some evidence that after Brown's bloody raid at Ossawatomie Creek in Kansas, citizens of Akron raised cash and contributed weapons to Brown when he returned to describe his passionate fight against slavery in the summer of 1856. Akron historian Karl Grismer believed that cases of arms stored in the Summit County Jail made their way into Brown's hands.
Brown ended up fleeing the country, taking refuge at Chatham, Ontario. By the summer of 1859, John Brown decided to do something about slavery once and for all. Returning to the United States, he and a group of others decided to raid a federal arsenal in a place called Harpers Ferry, Virginia, which is now in West Virginia.
The raid, which took place on October 16, 1859, was a failure. Brown was captured, put on trial, and condemned to death for his actions. On December 2, 1859, John Brown was hanged at Charles Town, Virginia. His body was sent to New York State to be buried on the grounds of his farmhouse in North Elba.
While John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry failed, it did force the nation to pay attention to the slavery issue. The national controversy over Brown's trial helped fracture the Democratic Party, which helped Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln win the election of 1860. Unhappiness with the results of that election led, in part, to South Carolina deciding to secede from the United States, an action which led in turn to the Civil War.