Serendipity is a wonderful thing

[kaberett]

As none of you have any particular reason to remember, my grandmother was an Austrian.

My mother was asking me today about Progress On The PhD, and followed up by asking what the next chapter was going to be on, then -- not expecting to recognise the volcano name.

"Popocatepetl--" I said...

"-- is der Berg in Mexiko, yes yes, oui oui, si si, so so!" she replied.

Turns out there's a 1951 German music hall song about it that she was taught as a nursery rhyme... and it's on YouTube.

Comments

[kaberett]

(this conversation is edited lightly for the purposes of narrative; in fact she said "where is that? Is it Mexico?" and then burst into song.)

[serpentrose]

hah, that's awesome.

[kaberett]

RIGHT.

That's lovely.

[jesse_the_k]

And it puts me in mind of Ernst Toch's Geographical Fugue -- music and lyrics at the link.

Re: That's lovely.

[ghoti_mhic_uait]

Me too!

Re: That's lovely.

[kaberett]

Ha! Thank you :)

[alexwlchan]

…that’s amazing.

[kaberett]

The Internet is marvellous. Like. It very much contains us, as a species, at our worst, but as a medium it also demonstrates and facilitates us at our best.

(My mother was half-convinced that maybe? it was something her mother? had just made up? BUT NO, it took all of 30 seconds with a search engine to... find it. Slightly longer to establish the copyright date, but not much.)

[vass]

(My mother was half-convinced that maybe? it was something her mother? had just made up? BUT NO, it took all of 30 seconds with a search engine to... find it. Slightly longer to establish the copyright date, but not much.)

I've had that same experience! My grandmother used to recite "Here we are again, happy as can be, all good friends and jolly good company!" None of us knew it was a song until my brother saw the lyrics somewhere, and I did a search, and lo and behold. (Here you may see two smols doing their best at it in 1932.

[azurelunatic]

*delight*

[kaberett]

RIGHT.

[ludy]

My first association with Popocatapetl is a memory of my Dad reciting this poem (his Mum was an English teacher so he grew up with a lot of poetry and random quotes)

[kaberett]

Oooh, thank you! :)

[jack]

Oh, lovely!

[emperor]

:-)

[katzenfabrik]

I am delighted by this, and further charmed that the singer's name is Igelhoff. :D

[wohali]

So I sent this story to my university mentor who is in his 80s now. He was born and raised in Austria.

He shares:

"I was born there in 1939 and left it in 1955, so a 1951 song could certainly have been 'on my radar.'

"I played the Youtube video, but did not recognize it, nor the musician, Peter Igelhoff.

"Yet this mention of Popocatepetl has cast a kind of reminiscent spell on me, so that I'm sure I heard it as a kid in Austria. Maybe on the radio. Though even that is less plausible than might be assumed, because the Americans, the Allied nationality occupying my part of Austria, had taken over the town's radio station and played American music. That signal was so strong, you could practically light a lightbulb with it.

"So it was the American radio station I mostly listened to, starting with a crystal set around the age of 10, and graduating to fancier vacuum tube radios I built in later years until I left for the USA in 1955 -- the beginnings of my electronics career. My mother had applied for a visa in 1945, but it took 10 years to get it. And ironically, it was while I was on the Queen Elizabeth from Cherbourg to New York that the peace treaty was signed and the Allied post-war occupation of Austria was lifted.

"By the way, the New York of 1955 was a paradise of dirt-cheap Korean war surplus electronics on Canal Street, which really energized my electronics interests. While I finished High School in New York, I built citizens band radio transmitter/receiver. I particularly remember building a nice dual-conversion superhet receiver, which worked fine. But I had made it with non-standard 1st and 2nd IF frequencies, because I hadn't read up on American standards and had wound my own IF transformers. Great days, those.

"Oh, the Popocatepetl-evoked memories. Thanks for sending it, and feel free to share it with your friend."