It was August 27, 1969, a hot, humid day in Amsterdam, a small, working-class manufacturing town that straddles the lazy Mohawk River, named after the Indian tribe that once inhabited the river valley in upstate New York. The town was over two hundred and fifty years old, and there were still families whose ancestors were the original Dutch and English settlers in the area, but the majority of the population now was comprised of Italian, Polish, Eastern European, and Irish immigrants whose families had come to Amsterdam to work in the carpet factories. In its center was a bridge that spanned the Mohawk and watched barges head west along the river to Lake Erie or east to the Hudson and then to the Atlantic. The river was once a place for fishing and swimming, but those days were long past. Parents told their kids to stay away from the river, or they’d catch some kind of disease. Even so, the river was still an important part of the city. The old Italian men still enjoyed watching the trains across the river as they played bocce at their riverfront club on the south side. They were from the old country, and they brought some of its ways with them. They ate dandelions and mushrooms that they picked at the bocce club, and some may have even fished in the river.
It wasn’t just the Italians that had a club. Every immigrant group in the town of thirty thousand had at least one club and church. The Irish had the Hibernians and St. Mary’s; the Polish, Polish National Legion and St. Johns; the Ukrainians, the Ukrainian Club and St. Stanislaus; the Lithuanians, St. Casimir’s and the Lithuanian Club; and each club had its own softball team that competed in one of the city softball leagues. Softball was an important part of summer in Amsterdam, just as bowling was in winter. A man who hit home runs in the softball league or was frequently listed on the sports page of the Amsterdam Recorder for bowling three games totaling over 600 could become a hometown hero. Like most working-class towns, sports were a big part of life in Amsterdam.
During the summer, most folks in town spent weekend days at the lakes about thirty miles north of the city in the Adirondack Mountains. A constant stream of cars traveled Route 30, the two-lane highway that ran north of town to the Sacandaga Reservoir. Kids sitting in the backseats urged their parents to stop at the Tastee Freeze or Herm’s Charcoal Pit, two places on Route 30 that served the best ice cream in the area. Teenagers revved their cars on Route 30 on their way to Vandenbergs, the beach where teens hung out. Vandenbergs was an oasis from parents, a place to smoke cigarettes, have a six pack, and flirt. It cost five dollars to park at Vandenbergs, but access to the beach was free, so the goal was to pack as many kids into a car as possible. Vandenbergs was at the end of a narrow, winding road from Route 30. Everybody in town knew that in 1966 a couple of teens died after missing one of the S-shaped turns in the road and smashing their new Jaguar XKE directly into a huge tree. That story was told many times at the beach, especially after someone looked like they’d had too much beer on a hot afternoon.
But on this Saturday afternoon, in a white house on Summit Avenue in a nice, middle-class, tree-lined neighborhood, Tim “Kelso” Kelly wasn’t headed for the beach; he was just waking up. Through his bedroom window he could hear the locusts buzzing, announcing that it would be a hot afternoon. Kelso was a disorderly looking wiry young man of eighteen with thick brown nappy hair to his shoulders and a scraggly beard. He looked like he’d be much more at home in Berkeley or Haight-Ashbury than Amsterdam, but that’s where he had always lived. His father had been a physician in town, but passed away at an early age, leaving Tim and everyone in the Kelly family in mourning for many years to follow.
Kelso had been out late the night before, mingling with the locals at Baia’s, a small tavern where college-age kids went to play darts, drink beer, talk with the locals or just sit and watch people. Kelso had only two beers the night before – that wasn’t why he had slept so late. At that stage of his life, he didn’t like mornings. It was that simple. There was nothing to do on Saturday morning. He had outgrown Saturday morning television, he didn’t really like breakfast or physical exercise, his white Irish skin was too pale for sunbathing at the beach, he didn’t have a girlfriend, and his chronic blepharitis bothered him in the morning. So, Kelso tried to stay in bed as long as possible. He kept the drapes in his bedroom permanently drawn to ease his eyes. Better not to see the sun, at least until late in the afternoon when the real action started, he always thought.
One thing about Kelso that everyone agreed: although few things interested him, he pursued what did interest him with passion. His favorite pastime was lying on his bed listening to music, like his collection of records by Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, an avant-garde band that appealed to only the most cynical of rock fans. He also coveted his collection of Frank Zappa records, which were of the same genre. He sometimes played his guitar to the music and imagined himself a Zappa band member. His mother didn’t like him staying in his room so much and she was especially concerned about the kind of music he liked. “Tim, you should go out and do something. Isn’t there anything you want to get done today? Get some exercise. You’re starting to get a potbelly and you’re not even twenty. Get out of the house and go with your friends,” she used to say. “Ah, but Mrs. Kelly, you don’t understand. Tim is an artiste,” Kelso’s friend Tates Black would say between Yahtzee plays at the kitchen table. Tates was a huge young man with wild hair, but a gentle, playful manner. During the summer college break he worked for his father’s refrigeration and cooling business, carrying air conditioners and refrigerators. It was rumored that Tates had lifted a Volkswagen out of a ditch all by himself. “Artiste, schmartiste,” Mrs. Kelly would retort as she rolled the dice. “Yes, but he thinks very deeply, like an artiste and he has the heart of a musician,” Tates liked to say.
Kelso did have the heart of a musician. He’d sit in his bedroom for hours playing his guitar along with Captain Beefheart. Perhaps he dreamed of becoming a professional musician during those many hours. He never discussed it. But despite the many hours of practice, his guitar playing was not a match for Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, or even the Captain Beefheart band, and his singing voice was very average, so he must have realized that he was not destined for stardom as a musician. However, as if God had given him some consolation, Kelso had an exceptional talent for one instrument—the hand flute. In fact, Kelso played the hand flute better than anyone in Amsterdam and, some people said, better than anyone in all of New York. People pointed him out and said, “That’s the guy who plays the hand flute so well”. This made Tim feel proud and whenever he heard such a comment he threw his shoulders back, cupped his hands, brought both thumbs to his mouth and blew through his thumbs to produce a flute-like sound. He could produce very loud sounds with the hand flute and had quite a range of different pitches, which astonished listeners. He knew that he had an unusual gift and although he realized that it wasn’t really all that significant a gift, he did feel good when listeners gave him praise and, at least for now, he felt at peace when he played the hand flute. He knew that in a town like Amsterdam you could become a celebrity for bowling 600 or doing something like playing the hand flute.
On his good days, Kelso ventured down Summit Avenue, past the home of the Gavrys. The Gavry’s were a Lithuanian family whose name when they came to Amsterdam was Gavrilchuk. As they used to say about their name, “What’s the big deal? We just decided to chuck the ‘ilchuk’”. At the intersection with Glen Ave., Kelso took a right and walked down the hill, past Grant Avenue, under the low-hanging Maple and Elm trees, past the home of Dutch Howland, the Bishop Scully high school basketball coach, and across Romeyn Avenue to Mac’s Confectionery. Young children were sometimes in front of the store with their bicycles. Some sat on the low cement wall at one end of the one-story yellow wooden building, looking at baseball cards, talking about the latest Yankees game, or eating popsicles; others sometimes played catch or threw a frisbee in the vacant lot next to the store. The confectionery owners, Mac and Virginia Riano, a couple in their sixties, greeted Kelso as he closed the front door, and the bells attached to the back of the door jingled. As he walked past the cash register to the booth area Kelso made a point of stealing a glance at Sally Valar’s legs while she served customers from behind the soda counter. Sally, a Bishop Scully junior, was a year or two younger than Kelso. “Legs to die for,” he’d say to himself. He secretly fantasized about lots of girls that frequented Mac’s, old acquaintances from high school, just about anyone. Fantasizing was one of his favorite pastimes and when he sat in the red vinyl booth at Mac’s he’d watch the girls who’d walk in the store and imagine that they secretly desired him.
When Kelso wanted to get the attention of girls in Mac’s, he’d play the hand flute very loud. Mac and Virginia sometimes commented to the customers standing near the cash register or sitting at the counter, “I don’t especially like that sound, but isn’t he good at it?”. When he heard such praise, Tim flared his left hand out to change the pitch, demonstrating his range. When friendly girls were sitting on the red swivel stools at the soda counter, Tim took extra time away from his cherry Coke and Mad Magazine to entertain them. “Hey girls, listen to this,” he’d say. The girls, most of them no more than twelve or thirteen, nodded and giggled.
There were many Kelso wanna-bes in town, inferior hand flute players, who came to Mac’s to match skills or challenge Kelso. There was Chris Gavry (Gavrilchuk), who played a mediocre hand flute at best. Chris liked to chew bubble gum and smoke Merits. This gave his hand flute an unusual cavernous sound and a smoky smell. Then there was Tim McKnight, a former high school football star, who now was more interested in emulating Stephen Stills, his favorite singer, than in catching touchdown passes. McKnight liked to sing in public, play air guitar, and would occasionally play hand flute. There was Tates, who had huge hands, a definite asset for hand flute playing, but was limited to only two notes, high and low. And, finally, there was Paul Gavry, Chris’ older brother. He may have been the best of the Kelso followers, but he was still learning the finer points.
Kelso was very polite and patient with hand flute contenders. He never directly discussed their failings in the art, nor did he give direct instruction or discuss his hand flute skill. When the subject came up or when someone made a poor attempt at imitation, Kelso would patiently demonstrate the proper technique. If the truth be told, he liked following his imitators’ weak attempts with a demonstration of the real thing. This seemed to be the right compromise between instructing the imitators, which seemed inconsistent with his light-hearted attitude toward life, and ignoring them, which seemed either too arrogant or too humble, he couldn’t decide which. Usually his demonstrations produced silence and almost reverence. For example, McKnight and Paul understood their inferiority and would shake their heads in amazement. But, there were also those like Tates and Chris who were so uncultivated they were unable to recognize their own shortcomings. Sometimes after giving a lesson to the “contenders” Kelso would smirk to himself before returning to his Mad Magazine. He knew he was the best and he allowed himself just a little bit of pride every so often.
There were also Kelso protégés in the neighborhood, young neighborhood kids who stood outside of Mac’s practicing the hand flute. When Kelso wasn’t around, you would hear them say things like, “Here’s how he does it,” or “I saw him do it this way”. One time a youngster was overheard saying, “You know how they sing that song about the Pinball Wizard? They ought to sing a song about him called the Hand Flute Wizard”. When the kids saw Kelso walking down Glen Ave. they stopped playing, stopped talking and watched “the master” as he strolled by into the store. Then they tried to peek through the window, around the many ads taped to the glass. As misfortune would have it, Kelso’s favorite booth was directly behind a big yellow and black ad that read “Develop Your Film Here, 24 Pics for $1.99,” but they’d still find a way to catch a glimpse of him and sometimes they could hear him play the flute.
On some days the traffic was very light at Mac’s. Only a few neighborhood people stopped in to buy bread or milk. An older neighborhood man named Bob Kroller was there every day. He nodded at Kelso in the booth and sometimes said hello. Lots of rumors followed Bob because he was a single man who lived alone and wasn’t very friendly. He wasn’t especially impressed with Kelso’s hand flute, probably because he didn’t know how it was made or maybe because he was planning his next softball game. Buster Schuster sometimes stopped over to the store to buy groceries for his mother. Buster was a few years younger than Kelso, but big for his age. For some reason, Buster called Kelso “Top”. “Hi Top, you see anything good in that magazine? You think it’s goin’ to rain today? I hope not; I have a baseball game tonight. My mother told me to drink some milk, so that’s what I am goin’ ta buy,” Buster might say.
On August 27, 1969, near the end of the summer, a group of the regulars met at Mac’s on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Besides Kelso, Tates Black, Chris Gavry, McKnight, Scott Merrow (a fellow Irish Summit Ave. resident), Tim Blanchfield (the sweet but feral weightlifter from McClellan Ave., famous in town for diving off the Amsterdam bridge among other antics), and Paul Gavry were there. Sally Valar and Marie Labate were behind the counter. Mac and Virginia were at the register, talking to customers and stocking shelves. Marie had a radio behind the counter tuned to 1540 AM, WPTR, which was playing “I Am Woman” by Helen Reddy. “Hey Marie, switch it to a different station, will ya?” Paul yelled. “IT’S ALMOST OVER,” Marie replied with the absolute authority of a teenager controlling the dial.
Mercifully, the song ended. “Let’s go take a drive to Vandenbergs, it’s so hot,” Tates suggested, already calculating how many bodies they could humanly jam into one vehicle to split the five-dollar parking fee. “Yeah, let’s go,” agreed Blanch, his heavy lifting muscles twitching at the thought of a cold six-pack, “We can grab some beer on the way. What do ya say Timbo?”
Kelso didn’t answer; he was utterly locked in on the next tune that had already started on the radio. From the first few notes, he and everyone else in Mac’s recognized it. Bumm-bumm-bababa-bumm-bumm-bummm-bumm groaned the electric guitars. It was the unmistakable opening of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” by Iron Butterfly, a heavy-psych masterpiece that required the kind of raw stamina usually reserved for moving refrigerators with Tates.
Kelso cupped his hands, aligned his thumbs with surgical precision, and raised them to his mouth. Sensing history in the making, the Gavrys took their cue. Both Paul and Chris raised their hands into formation like a low-budget woodwind section. McKnight, chatting up Marie at the counter, caught the movement in the back-counter mirror, spun on his heel, and sprinted back toward the booth.
Kelso belted out the lead. The hand flute notes cut through the humid, confectionery air, piercingly loud and perfectly in tune. The Gavrys joined in right on time, providing a dense, cavernous bass harmony—tinted slightly by Chris’s lingering bubble gum and Merit smoke. Scott Merrow instantly began hammering out a thundering drum solo directly onto the Formica tabletop, threatening to shatter Mac’s red vinyl booths. McKnight dropped into a low stance, shredding a wildly expressive air guitar with his right hand while screaming out the feedback sounds of a heavy steel Gibson. Blanch, unable to contain his feral energy, abandoned all decorum and danced violently in the aisle, treating the confectionery floor likecenter stage at Woodstock.
Paul stopped playing to grip an imaginary microphone, joining McKnight and Tates to roar out the lyrics: “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, honey, don’t you know that I love you?” Their faces twisted into the classic, deeply pained contortions of tortured rock stars. Kelso, completely unfazed, remained deep in the zone, driving the lead flute forward while Scott kept the relentless tabletop beat going: “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, baby, don’t you know that I’ll always be truuuhuue?”
The imaginary guitars whined, and every single bystander in the building began vocalizing the rhythm to support Kelso’s soaring lead. The entire booth bellowed: “Oh, won’t you come with me-hee-hee anda take my haahaa-haand? …Oh, won’t you come with me-hee-hee anda walk this laaa-haa-haa-haaaaaand?” On Kelso’s sharp nod, the whole store unified for the explosive chorus: “Pleeeeease take my haa-HAAA-haaa-haaanndddd!”
As the song hit its transition, everyone else naturally faded out to catch their breath, but Kelso stayed right at the peak. He belted out the rest of the grueling track with such absolute style, flair, and pure panache that the entire store fell into a hushed, reverent silence.
Marie and Sally stopped pouring cherry Cokes; Mac and Virginia abandoned the cash register entirely and walked out into the aisle; the neighborhood kids who had been squinting past the yellow “Develop Your Film Here” ad pushed the front door open, causing the bells to jingle frantically as they swarmed inside. Even the customers on the red swivel stools spun around, completely transfixed. It was a defining, once-in-a-lifetime, totally surreal moment where an eighteen-year-old in nappy hair and a scraggly beard held the entire world on the tip of his thumbs.
As Kelso hit the final, soaring note, the confectionery erupted into a frenzy of applause, whistles, and stamping feet. Hand slaps rained down from all sides. Blanch clapped him on the back, shouting, “Tim Kelly, you are the big cheese, you are the big kahuna!” Marie wiped a genuine tear from her eye. “That was beautiful, Tim,” she said softly. “Yeah, Tim, that was real good,” Sally added, looking up from the soda counter. Buster Schuster shook his head in awe: “You really know how to play that thing, Top”. Virginia turned proudly to a bewildered customer at the register: “I have known him since he was a little boy. He’s been coming in here for years. He’s always been such a good boy, and so talented”. It was a glorious, unadulterated celebration of Amsterdam’s premier musical anomaly.
The gang broke up after that, as twenty-somethings eventually do, scattering to their separate lives. Mac’s Confectionery closed its doors shortly thereafter. Mac and Virginia retired and have long since passed on, as has Bob Kroller. Paul married Marie—proving that shouting across the counter at her during Helen Reddy songs was an effective courtship strategy—and they now have grown kids. McKnight and Blanch went on to become teachers, shaping the next generation of Amsterdamians, and Scott passed away after a distinguished 30-year career as a Colonel in the Air Force.
As for Kelso? He migrated to Ohio and became a lawyer, trading his Mad Magazines for legal briefs. But the rumors filtering back from the Buckeye State say that while he may be a professional man of the law now, the legend hasn’t died. Underneath the suit, he still possesses the heart of an artist and the lungs of a virtuoso. On very special occasions, if the room is right and the nostalgia hits just right, Tim Kelly will still cup his hands, bring his thumbs to his lips, and effortlessly blow away the competition.
