Thoughts from a Sun lounger (Part 4)

Posted on Aug 27, 2016 by Steve Higgins

I don’t think there is any nicer feeling than to take a dip in a swimming pool and then after a few lengths, return to your sun lounger and lie there peacefully while the hot sun dries your body. You can feel little rivulets of water dripping away and in time the sun will gradually dry you. It’s almost like a sort of rebirth or a least a refreshing of the soul. The only sounds in this remote hamlet where we are staying are the gentle breeze swaying through the branches of a nearby tree, the quiet humming of insects, some bird song and the occasional drone of a far away car or tractor.

You might be thinking hang on, why is this guy waxing lyrical about lying on a sun bed? Yes it’s that time of year again, holiday time. Once again Liz and I have travelled to France to spend time in a beautiful gîte in the Cher region of France.

Travelling down here was a little bit of a trial though. Coming down the M6 in the north-west we had to travel through the roadworks for the new Smart motorway scheme. I don’t know that Smart is really the right name for this concept but the idea is that the traffic runs along the hard shoulder in the busy periods thus shifting more traffic. So the experts say, anyway. Whether that will happen I really don’t know but at the moment the whole area is bit of a nightmare and when we finally got through that we came across more delays round about junction 13. Throw in some torrential rain and spray, creating really poor driving conditions and you begin to get the picture. Anyway, we made it to the terminal in Folkestone with about ten minutes to spare; many thanks to Liz for her fabulous driving.

One thing I noticed during the journey down here was the enormous amount of tyre carcasses in the central reservation. It really seems to me that Highways England need to pull their finger out and clean up the motorway otherwise I may just start up a scrap rubber company and pick up all those discarded tyres, and believe me I’ve counted a hell of a lot of tyres on the way south. I reckon I can make an absolute fortune flogging all those tyres to Goodyear or Pirelli or even some rubber recycling company. Come on Highways, get your act together!

French phrase book After the hell of UK motorway travel, the roads of France are just a delight. OK, it might be busy round Paris and other large towns but out in the countryside driving is once again an enjoyable experience. Stopping at the services is much nicer too. Not for us the packed UK services charging ridiculous amounts for a cup of tea. The French aires are quiet and picturesque. Nice rural stopping places with picnic tables and nice clean toilets. Lovely.

In the UK I have had a great deal of trouble with my back. The doctor offered me pain killers which I declined, well, I must admit I did take some, the pain was that bad. Anyway I asked to be referred to a physiotherapist. Get the problem sorted out at the source I thought. This gets complicated here so bear with me: I started off with a telephone appointment, one in which you are supposed to make an ‘actual’ appointment. It did not go well because although I rang at the specified time, I was given several messages to listen to and options to choose so when I eventually got through, the lady at the other end thought I was late for an ‘actual’ appointment, not a telephone appointment and could not arrange it for me as I was two minutes late. Anyway, to cut a long story short I spoke to her boss and made an appointment (an ‘actual’ appointment) and arrived on the day only to find that my ‘actual’ appointment had been cancelled due to a bereavement at the hospital. Pity they didn’t tell me in advance. (They said that they had left a message on my mobile – which I never received, although on the same day my garage had managed to leave me a message about my car and my brother had also left a message. Strange that two others had no problem leaving messages.)

Anyway, with me so far? Another appointment was duly made and then two days before that appointment I received a letter saying that had been cancelled too. I called to complain only to be told I had cancelled the appointment! I most certainly did not, I said in my best aggrieved customer voice. I eventually spoke to a manager and she managed to arrange another date which fitted into my calendar just nicely between work and leaving for France.

When I finally found myself face to face with a physiotherapist, or at least someone who claimed to be a physiotherapist, he spent a lot of time asking me questions about my pain, which, when it first occurred three months previously had been very severe but now it wasn’t so bad, in fact the actual spot in the middle of my back seemed OK but the pain was now in my neck and lower back. Sadly, those areas were not the ones that I had been referred for via my GP. Now those two areas, the neck and lower back, happen to be a matter of inches from the source of the original pain so let me throw out a crazy mad concept here: could they be related? Well, we’ll never know because as my physio pointed out yet again; my GP had not referred me for those areas! After a lengthy consultation of which perhaps five minutes was actual hands on my back stuff, my physio declared my back was ‘mechanically’ sound. How did he explain the pain I asked? Well, that was a muscular issue due to my ‘sedentary’ life style. As we were on the way out he mentioned it was perhaps ‘not worth seeing me again.’

Interesting. Perhaps the problem solving concept was not something this guy covered at university, perhaps they don’t even teach that kind of stuff any more. I know that if I was a physio and someone came to me with back pain my job would be trying to find the source of that pain and cure it or ease it or suggest further treatment for my patient. It’s rather like having a problem with your car and telling the customer, well, we can’t fix that, perhaps it’s time to get a new motor. In this case, no new motor is available! I’m tempted to apply my usual rule here, that names have been changed to protect the innocent but Clifton Hospital in St Annes, Lancashire, you have gone way down in my estimation!

Anyway, the temperature here in our little village is currently in the 90s. (Fahrenheit of course. If you want that in Celsius, I don’t do metric, work it out yourself!) Time for a read, perhaps a short doze, then another swim in the pool. After all, exercise is good for your back!

Make sure your click back here next Saturday for at look at my Holiday Book Bag!

If you liked this post, why not try my book, Floating In Space. Click the links at the top of the page for more information!

Howard Hughes and the Watergate Tapes.

Posted on Aug 20, 2016 by Steve Higgins

A week or so ago, August the 8th was the anniversary of the resignation of President Richard Nixon. He resigned the US presidency in 1974 after realising his battle to remain in office was finally lost. His battle for his tapes, which he believed were his personal property went on and on and was continued by his estate even after his death.

I have always understood that John F Kennedy was the first President to install a taping system in the white house though Wikipedia seems to think the practice began with Roosevelt. Many of the recordings made during Kennedy’s presidency have been released including those of cabinet meetings during the missile crisis of 1962.

Johnson carried on the tradition of taping and recording phone calls and numerous calls have been declassified and released by the authorities. Some with a special poignancy were even recorded on Air Force One on the 22nd November, 1963, the day Kennedy was shot and Johnson elevated to the presidency.

Anyway, despite his two predecessors, the President most famous for taping in the white house was Richard Nixon and it was the ‘Watergate tapes’ that were at the heart of the Watergate scandal and after reading many books on the subject I feel the Watergate scandal as it came to be known really had its roots in the turbulent year of 1968.

1968 was a landmark year for Nixon and for the USA itself. The public feeling for Vietnam had turned more and more sour as more GIs returned home in body bags. Demonstrations began; university campuses were alight with protests.

In the first primaries of the year incumbent president Johnson, who previously had a high approval rating with the public was surprised by a good showing from rival Senator Eugene McCarthy, running on a anti-war stance. His success urged Robert Kennedy to throw his hat into the ring and on the 3^rd June, 1968 Johnson announced in a televised broadcast that he would not accept the nomination for president. Vietnam had overshadowed his presidency and all his other efforts, his so called ‘great society’ and his civil rights programme; all were overshadowed by the conflict in Vietnam.

Martin Luther King was shot dead in 1968 as was Senator Kennedy. Kennedy’s body was taken to Washington from California by rail and as millions waited by the tracks to watch his funeral train pass by, it must have seemed for many Americans like the end of the world.

Howard Hughes For one man though, sitting alone in a Nevada hotel suite, sealed off from the world by his Mormon minders, the death of Bobby Kennedy was an opportunity. The elderly Hughes, lying naked on a bed watching TV, his hair, long and unkempt and his finger and toenails uncut, was a far cry from the young film maker, aviator, and entrepreneur he had once been. Immediately he wrote a memo to his chief executive and public alter ego, Robert Maheu. He said basically that now Kennedy was lying dead or dying on the pantry floor of a California hotel this was a once in a lifetime opportunity to put on the payroll the entire Kennedy election team, in particular electoral strategist Larry O’Brien. O’Brien had served under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and would later become chairman of the Democratic National Convention. Not a thought for the dying Kennedy, just the opportunity to get hold of a ready-made election team and put his own man in the white house. At the time Hughes had the idea of promoting Governor Laxalt of Nevada for the job. Fantastic as it may seem the genesis of what would become Watergate lay in Hughes actions on that night.

Hughes was worried about the nuclear testing in Nevada and he had sent Maheau on a mission to get Johnson to move the tests elsewhere. Johnson met with Maheau, listened, tried to get the promise of a donation towards his presidential library, but would not move the nuclear tests. Hughes felt he would need to speak with whoever won the election. Becoming increasingly more paranoid, and more and more worried about the nuclear testing, he tasked Maheau with offering a million dollar bribe to the man who would move the tests elsewhere:The man who would emerge victorious in the presidential election was Richard Nixon.

It was a pretty close run battle for the presidency in 1968 but Hubert Humphrey, the democratic candidate had little election funding although Hughes cannily hedged his bets. He made donations to both opposing candidates. Humphrey was elected as the democratic candidate in a shambolic convention marred by tear gas and protests and Eugene McCarthy, running on an anti-war ticket was ignored despite his earlier success in the primarys. Humphrey won the nomination even though he had not won or even contested any of the primarys. Richard Nixon however, won the eventual presidential election with his campaign pledges of ‘bring us together’ and ‘peace with honour’, which did not mean retreating from Vietnam as perhaps some people may have thought.

Picture courtesy Wikipedia

Nixon though, despite his victory, was worried. The defeat by John F Kennedy in 1960 still rankled. Many thought that the Kennedy victory had been a given a helping hand by voting fraud, especially in the Chicago area controlled by Democrat Governor Daley. Nixon though, felt his defeat was due to leaks about loans to his campaign and to his brother Donald from Howard Hughes. Larry O’Brien, despite his retainer from Hughes was running the democratic campaign and Nixon felt that O’Brien must know about Nixon’s own Hughes connection. What information did he have? What was in his safe in the Democratic Campaign headquarters in the Watergate building in Washington?

The FBI and CIA had already spurned Nixon’s requests for covert surveillance and they were dragging their feet over the leaks of highly classified information from government offices. The answer, it seemed to Nixon, was the creation of a white house covert intelligence unit that became known as the ‘Plumbers’ made up of of ex CIA and FBI members. Their job was to stop the leaks, and get Nixon the information he wanted.

Nixon wanted to know what was in Larry O’Brien’s safe in the Watergate building, what information did O’Brien have about a Nixon-Hughes connection? The plumbers would have to find out. On May 11th, 1972 the plumbers secretly entered the Democratic National Convention offices and left behind a number of bugs and listening devices. Problems arose soon afterwards when it was found the wiretapping devices were malfunctioning. There was no choice but to enter the building again. The five man team did so on the night of June 16th/17th 1972. Sometime after midnight on the 17th a security guard noticed that various doors into the building had been taped, preventing them from locking. He called the Police and the five men were arrested.

James W. McCord – a security co-ordinator for the Republican National Committee and the Committee for the Re-election of the President. McCord was also a former FBI and CIA agent.
Virgilio R. Gonzales – a locksmith from Miami, Florida. Gonzalez was a refugee from Cuba, following Castro’s takeover.
Frank A. Sturgis – another associate of Barker from Miami, he also had CIA connections and involvement in anti-Castro activities.
Eugenio R. Martinez – worked for Barker’s Miami real estate firm. He had CIA connections and was an anti-Castro Cuban exile.
Bernard L. Barker – a realtor from Miami, Florida. Former Central Intelligence Agency operative. Barker was said to have been involved in the Bay of Pigs incident in 1962.

The five men were charged with attempted burglary and attempted interception of telephone and other communications. The burglary was reported in the media and it seemed at first that the incident was an unremarkable ‘third class burglary’ just as the white house press secretary Ron Zeigler described it. Zeigler announced that white house aide John Dean had made a full investigation into the matter when in fact Dean had done no such thing. Two others, E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy who were involved in planning and arranging the break in, were also later arrested. They were the link from the burglars to the white house.

Gradually, various revelations appeared in the press, particularly those by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and this escalation of the issue, especially when reports of other abuses of power by the Nixon White House were revealed, forced the announcement of a Senate Investigation.

On February 7th 1973 the Senate voted to establish a select committee to investigate Watergate and during the hearings a surprising revelation emerged. On the 16th July 1973, testimony revealed that President Nixon had a recording system in the White House. Archibald Cox, the special counsel for investigating Watergate immediately issued a subpoena for the tapes. Nixon refused to hand them over citing executive privilege.

As you know, Nixon had to eventually hand over the tapes including one that had a mysterious eighteen minute gap. An impeachment process began and when Nixon was advised that the recommendation was likely to pass through the senate, he resigned. On August 8th, 1974, Nixon broadcast his resignation speech from the White House and stepped down at noon on the next day in favour of Gerald Ford.

One of the most interesting conversations on the Watergate tapes was, I have always thought, a conversation that took place on March 21st, 1973. John Dean felt that Watergate was fast becoming ‘a cancer within-close to the presidency, that’s growing. It’s growing daily’

John Dean: Where are the soft spots on this? Well, first of all, there’s the problem of the continued blackmail—

President Nixon: Right.

Dean: –which will not only go on now, it’ll go on when these people are in prison, and it will compound the obstruction-of-justice situation. It’ll cost money. It’s dangerous. Nobody, nothing–people around here are not pros at this sort of thing. This is the sort of thing Mafia people can do: washing money, getting clean money, and things like that. We just don’t know about those things, because we’re not used to, you know, we’re not criminals. We’re not used to dealing in that business. It’s a–

President Nixon: That’s right.

Dean: It’s a tough thing to know how to do.

President Nixon: Maybe we can’t even do that.

Dean: That’s right. It’s a real problem as to whether we could even do it. Plus, there’s a real problem in raising money. [John] Mitchell has been working on raising some money, feeling he’s got, you know, he’s got—he’s one of the ones with the most to lose. But there’s no denying the fact that the White House and [John] Ehrlichman, [Bob] Haldeman, and Dean are involved in some of the early money decisions.

President Nixon: How much money do you need?

Dean: I would say these people are going to cost a million dollars over the next two years.

Short pause.

President Nixon: We could get that.

Dean: Mm-hmm.

President Nixon: If you—on the money, if you need the money, I mean, you could get the money fairly easily.

Dean: Well, I think that we’re–

President Nixon: What I meant is, you could get a million dollars. And you could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten.

Dean: Mm-hmm.

President Nixon: I mean, it’s not easy, but it could be done.

Could it really have been that the million dollars that Nixon was talking about was the same million dollars Hughes was offering to get the nuclear testing moved elsewhere? A paranoid old billionaire living in squalor, obsessed by germs who everything handed to him had to be wrapped in tissue paper. Could it be that Howard Hughes’ obsessions had eventually brought down the Nixon white house?

Further reading.

The Ends of Power. H.R. Haldeman

All The President’s Men. Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward

Blind Ambition. John W. Dean

Will. G. Gordon Liddy

Citizen Hughes. Michael Drosnin

Steve Higgins is the author of Floating In Space available from Amazon.

Aliens, Frank Sinatra, and Three Days in the Life of a Couch Potato

Posted on Aug 13, 2016 by Steve Higgins

Day 1

In this technological age, one item in particular has come to the aid of the dedicated couch potato and that is the hard drive recorder. It’s a wonderful invention which enables the recording and playback of programmes at the touch of a button.

Last Sunday was my first day off and I had planned, unbeknown to my lovely lady Liz, a day of rest, self indulgence, and laziness, including Internet surfing and of course, TV watching.

She on the other hand had other ideas, in particular, a trip to the combination music and kite festival down on the beach. Anyway, all that went ok, the kites were flying well and the music was good. We went back home for some dinner and then it was time to get down to some TV viewing.

Now the Sunday lunch over ran a little making me late for my appointment with the German Grand Prix on Channel 4. Here, however, is where the hard drive recorder comes into its own because of one very simple fact: You can start watching the recorded programme even before it has finished! Technology; incredible isn’t it?

Anyway, The German Grand Prix from Hockenheim wasn’t a classic race but for an F1 fan like me it was well worth watching: Lewis Hamilton won and Nico Rosberg had a penalty but the real joy of watching the race just slightly behind the broadcast time is you can catch up by fast forwarding through the boring stuff from the drivers; “the team did a great job today in qually” and “I’d like to thank the guys back at the factory,” and so on. There is also the questions to the drivers which are well worth fast forwarding through: “You’re in second position on the grid, what can you do today?”
Not much of a record for a TV couch potato but I had big plans for day 2!

Day 2

Now day 2 promised much more TV watching than day 1. Liz was off to work round about twelve, leaving me time to check my e-mails, sort out a few social media updates plugging blog posts like this one, and then a whole afternoon of serious TV watching.

For starters I had Aliens, the sci-fi movie to watch, recorded from ITV 2 some weeks earlier. I have seen it before but some movies just get better over time. I do love the opening of Aliens: The music gradually fades in as we come across a lifeboat drifting through space. Yes, the lifeboat holds astronaut Ripley, sleeping soundly in suspended animation after her adventures in the previous movie, Alien. Ripley has been abandoned in space for 57 years and it turned out that this version was a director’s cut with a restored back story about Ripley’s daughter who we find has died recently as an old lady. The story gives an added poignancy to the film later on and we understand why Ripley is so passionate about rescuing the young girl ‘newt’ who we meet later in the film.

Time for a cuppa when we get to the adverts and then we follow Ripley through the committee meeting where it is revealed that the spacecraft Nostromo, which Ripley self-destructed, caused a loss of over 64 million adjusted dollars. Another committee member advises that LV426, the planet where the Nostromo landed was ‘a rock’ with no indigenous life forms. I can feel Ripley’s frustration when she says, “Did IQ levels just drop while I was away?” She tries to tell the group about a derelict alien vessel containing alien eggs but the meeting ends and Ripley’s story is not believed.

Now before Liz went to work she had left me a couple of jobs and the thought of them threatens my TV watching marathon so I decide to get them out of the way. One of them involved mowing the lawn so I put Aliens on pause and sorted out the mower and strimmer. I was actually immersed in my mowing when Liz popped back in and caught me doing a bit of grafting! This was great because she could see with her own eyes I’m not just sprawled on the couch watching TV! Result!

Anyway, job done and it’s time for some more TV. I fancy a change from Aliens so I finish off an episode of The Saint I watched part way through last week. A TV Diva is kidnapped but Simon Templar saves the day and rescues the lady. Nice to see these old TV shows from my school years still looking good and getting another airing on TV.

Time for a brew and a cheese sarnie, the Saint episode is deleted (that space on the hard drive is in constant demand!) and I’m ready for something more serious. I crank up a BBC 4 documentary about Frank Sinatra. I was planning to listen to it and simultaneously surf the net on my iPad but it’s so engrossing I have to put the pad down.

Six o’Clock and Liz is home and asking why am I not ready yet? Ready? Of course, we have a family meal planned for tonight. “Just about to get changed, love” I say quickly! (Phew!)

DAY 3

Day three and Liz is off to work at the usual time, twelve-ish. The breakfast pots are duly washed and the only cloud on the horizon is that I need to get some eggs and some milk in. Should I leave it until later or sort it now? Tell you what, time for a quick Saint episode (series record, I love that button on the recorder!) and a cuppa. The episode is one about the Saint receiving threats on his life and it’s a bit of a naff one with the back lot at Elstree or Pinewood trying desperately to look like swinging sixties London and wait a minute, isn’t that lady reporter played by the same lady who played the film actress diva in the last episode? The Saint, the more you watch it increasingly becomes like a little TV repertory company, with increasingly familiar faces, even in the bit parts. Anyway, I fast forward through most of it and then it’s off to the shops for the milk and eggs.

Sigourney Weaver as Ripley

Back home and it’s time for some more Aliens. I don’t know about you but I tend to watch a lot of recorded films in two or more parts. I settle down with Aliens and the Slimy Carter Burke has enticed Ripley on a trip to LV426 with the tough hombres of the Space Marine Chore. They drop into orbit over the planet, now inhabited by terraformers with their atmosphere processors and Ripley, Burke and the marines awake from hibernation. I think for a moment that if LV426 is that far away enough for the crew to hibernate while travelling there, it isn’t that much of an emergency rescue mission but hey, what do I know? Later they arrive on the planet in a pretty exciting drop from the mother craft. The marines secure the area but then find that the Aliens have taken the humans into the atmosphere processor to use their bodies to hatch more of their creatures. Aliens is a sort of hybrid film; a sci-fi horror action movie, combining two or even three genres. The rest of the series was a little poor if you ask me but the first two in the series: Alien and Aliens, are classic cinema. Sigourney Weaver creates a memorable movie character in Ripley, tough and uncompromising, she is a sort of female John McClane. (Remember the Bruce Willis character from Die Hard?)

Anyway, time for the usual afternoon cheese sarnie and a brew and I settle down to watch the end of the Frank Sinatra documentary. I found it highly interesting as the film explored Sinatra’s relationships and associations and shows how the Kennedys dumped him, not wanting to be associated with him when his friendships with mafia figures became public. Later, in the eighties, Sinatra, a lifelong Democrat allied himself with republican Ronald Reagan.

A quick check of my e-mails and some more posts sorted on Twitter and Google+ and time for another cuppa. (Choccy biscuit? Don’t mind if I do!) Time to crank up Aliens again and this time the action heats up as Carter Burke decides Ripley knows too much and he locks her in the med lab with one of the alien parasites. It’s a pretty scary sequence. Ripley gets away but the Aliens are trying to break through into the complex. Why are the radar tracker signs showing the Aliens inside? Look at the roof, people!

Enough scary stuff for today. Liz comes in and asks “Is my dinner ready?” in a tone that suggests she doesn’t think it is. I need to think fast and quickly come up with: “Thought we might go to the Turkish Restaurant darlin’.” “Well,” she says, “sounds nice, better get ready then.” As I leave to follow her I glance at myself in the mirror and hear myself saying: ‘Top TV couch potato? Steve, you are the man!’

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Think your Password is Safe? Think Again!

Posted on Aug 6, 2016 by Steve Higgins

In this digital hi tech age there is one thing of vital importance and that is passwords! It doesn’t matter if you are using a laptop, a PC, an iPad, a smartphone or even your credit card, a password is vital but it is also something of a huge pain in the rear. Different passwords for different web sites; your PC, your iPad, your smartphone, your bank cards. How can you remember them all? Easy, use something simple: great idea! Actually, no, it’s a bad idea, very bad!

Looking on the internet, a little research reveals that one of the most popular passwords is Password. Yes, some people apparently think computer security is of such low importance that they use a password like that.

Come to think of it, one of the systems I use at work has a similar password, only they have replaced the ‘o’ with a zero. Pretty sneaky eh? Bound to deter those resourceful cyber thieves. Yes, my colleagues and I at the Trident Nuclear Launch Centre were pretty pleased with that one!

Here are some other passwords that you shouldn’t use

123456
Yes, don’t try this one at home.

1234567
Yes, even with the extra seven, it’s still a little weak!

ABC123
For Jackson Five fans only!

QWERTY
Yes, it’s right there on the keyboard in front of you. Good reminder if you forget it.

1234567890
Another variation of the 123456 theme.

Football
Using the name of your favourite sport –Good idea if you are a fan of Japanese underwater polo!

Monkey
This word comes up on a lot of lists of bad passwords, although I’m not sure why. Perhaps there are a lot of fans of the old badly dubbed Japanese TV series ‘Monkey’. People do use names of their favourite TV show though, perhaps that explains why I used to use Fireball XL5 until I became rather interested in . . . oops, nearly let the cat out of bag there!

One final password story to finish. This doesn’t concern the internet but years ago I got a job working for a cigarette vending company. It was a bit of a pain getting to work that first week because I didn’t have a car. The bus nearest to my home didn’t start early enough so I had to take a twenty minute hike further up the road to catch the earlier bus to Warrington and then catch another bus from Warrington to work. Towards the end of the week my manager asked how I was getting on and I replied OK, apart from the trek to work. “What,” he said. “Why didn’t you say? You might as well take one of the spare vans; they only get used when one of the newer ones breaks down.”

That night I drove home in my very ‘own’ small ford van. In order to start the van you had to insert the key then enter a number on the keypad on the dashboard. Security was the watchword my boss explained. Our vans carried cigarettes, cigars and cash from the cigarette machines. It was vital to protect our assets and profits.

To start the van you had to enter a code into the pad. It was a six figure number and my boss stressed I couldn’t share it with anyone and writing it down was frowned upon. Anyway, I memorised the number, started the van and set off.

All went well that first week but somehow, between Friday night and Monday morning I suffered an inexplicable memory loss. Time after time I entered what I thought was the number only to see code incorrect flash up on the dash.
Eventually I had to admit defeat and call my boss. He wasn’t happy and rather dismissively passed me over to one of the other drivers.

“Where are you now?” asked the driver.
“Sat in the cab” I answered meekly.
“Well pull the sun visor down and tell me what you see.”

I pulled down the visor and there, in ballpoint pen, despite our company code of ethics; protecting profits and assets and so on, someone had written the high security code.

It was 234561! A slight variation on the number one password from the list of all-time worst passwords!

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Adventures with a Camera

Posted on Jul 30, 2016 by Steve Higgins

I have always been a photographer. My first camera was either a birthday or Christmas present and it was a Kodak Instamatic 126 which I still have. From my point of view that was a wonderful present; from my parents perspective, perhaps not, because back then in the late sixties cameras needed film and film had to be developed and printed which was fairly costly, especially if you had a child that liked taking pictures and also, whose first attempts were not so good. These days if you take some dud pictures with a digital camera- delete them! It’s no big deal. Back then it was expensive!

I remember getting a major verbal lashing from my Mum when we had gone to Boots to collect my photographs. I was using colour film and Mum had to shell out for my pictures of my action man in various poses in the back garden! (Action man? Hey, I was 12!)

Bob the Dog.

Here’s one of my favourite pictures, it’s our old dog Bob. You can read more about Bob in this previous post but he was a lovely dog, part Manchester terrier and part something else. My brother and I, well the whole family really, had a lot of fun with him and one day I caught him sitting in the sun in the back garden, slipped a pair of sunglasses on him and there he is, saved for as long as that black and white snap will last.

Zenith TTL

I was in my twenties before I got my next camera. I bought it from a work colleague who was upgrading and the camera came with a huge 200mm lens, some filters and other bits and pieces. As you can see by this next picture I became really hooked on photography and starting buying camera magazines and books and really learning how to use a camera. I enjoyed taking special effects shots such as double exposures and hand firing the flash in darkened rooms with the camera shutter open. Also I used to take a lot of still life shots such as this one of my camera kit and books.

Olympus OM10

As I gained more confidence I naturally wanted to upgrade. The camera I chose was an Olympus OM10. As time went on I gradually accrued quite a collection of lenses and filters. In the 1980s I was really keen on motor sport and I spent a lot of Sunday afternoons at Oulton Park racing circuit in Cheshire. Silverstone, the home of the British Grand Prix is not so photographer friendly with high fences and the spectators kept back from the track in the interests of safety. Hockenheim, the venue for this weekends German Grand Prix was a circuit I visited in 1988 and I took some great pictures there.

Alain Prost, McLaren Honda 1988

I had a motorwind and a zoom lens and I took some great shots of cars out on the circuit as well as some with my wide-angle lens in the paddock. (Not the paddock at Hockenheim I might add, even in 1988 it was far too expensive for me but Oulton Park’s paddock used to be pretty easily accessible, and fairly cheap.) Later, I bought an Olympus OM2SP, a little more sophisticated than the OM10 but still pretty easy to use.

Digital

I started the digital era with a canon powershot camera and then a Fuji that I picked up second-hand. My first and so far only digital DSLR is a Nikon D100. It’s still a fairly old-fashioned camera; it has the old style flashcard. I bought it on e-bay and I’m really happy with it. I do so love the digital camera age. With digital you can shoot like a professional, bracket your shots and take those extra frames to make sure you have captured your shot perfectly. No need to hold back or worry about running out of film, no need to worry about developing and printing costs. Cover yourself by taking shot after shot and just delete the unwanted ones. Even if they are not quite right, once the image is on your laptop or pc you can re-size, brighten, sharpen, add or take away colour. I’m so glad I have kept all my older, slightly poorer shots because now I can scan them and sort them out with my ten-year old version of photoshop or even with free editing sites like picmonkey. You can even take some of your pictures and convert them to a gif at sites like http://gifmaker.me/

As a blogger, photographs brighten up my blog posts and pull the reader in. On Twitter and Facebook, posts with images pull in 94% more views than posts without a relevant image. That’s a pretty staggering statistic so get out your camera today, even if it’s just your smartphone camera, and get snapping!

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The Saint, James Bond, and a Rather Hot Afternoon.

Posted on Jul 23, 2016 by Steve Higgins

The Saint and James Bond I spent a lot of time last week trolling through my book collection and photographing the books for last week’s post about Marilyn Monroe. It wasn’t quite that easy because since my divorce my books have been boxed up in the spare room at my Mum’s house and it took me a while to search through the boxes and find the books I wanted. The other problem was that being a bit of a book fanatic, I kept coming across books I’d not read for ages or forgotten about and my original task was put on hold while I sat and started reading! I came across my James Bond book collection and as you will know from reading these posts I do love James Bond.

One of the Bond books I found was ‘Live and Let Die’. It’s not one of the best in the book series but it’s pretty good. Roger Moore played Bond in the movie version, in fact it was Moore’s first Bond movie and I have to say, Roger just didn’t do it for me as Bond. He just didn’t look the part unlike the previous 007, George Lazenby, who completely fitted in with the Bond of my imagination.

Live and let Die Sadly, Lazenby listened to some poor advice which advised him that secret agent espionage films were on the way out: They weren’t, but it turned out Lazenby was. Sean Connery filled in for one more Bond film, Diamonds are Forever, until Moore took over on Live and Let Die.

Moore was a poor Bond. He looked like a sort of tailor’s dummy all the way through the film and was unable to present that hard edge that a real spy must have had. Don’t get the idea that I don’t like Roger Moore though because the fact is he’s one of my favourite TV and film actors and was great in the TV version of the Saint. His slightly flippant, happy go lucky personality was perfect for Simon Templar, the playboy cum adventurer of the TV series.

I have always loved that opening sequence in the Saint. You know, the bit where he meets some pretty girl, something happens like an attempted robbery or something, Templar saves the day and the girl says, ‘aren’t you the famous Simon Templar?’ Moore then looks up, raises an eyebrow, a halo appears and then we cut into the theme tune and the opening titles.

Funnily enough, The Saint is currently being reshown on ITV4 during the day and as I have come into possession of one of those freeview digital recorders it’s so easy to record all the episodes. Just a touch of the series link button and there they are, queuing up on the hard drive waiting for my viewing pleasure.

I started watching one today; it was an episode about an actress who is what they call today a ‘diva’. The Saint was invited to watch some filming by his old friend Lois Maxwell who would one day play Miss Moneypenny to Moore’s James Bond. The actress threw a bit of a wobbler and retreated into her caravan which was then hijacked right out of the studio and the actress held to ransom. I’m not sure how the episode ended because it was so hot (Tuesday as I write this) I had to get outside for some fresh air.

That’s the thing about the UK. You know how it is -once a year the temperature in Manchester is higher than in Barcelona and the newspapers suddenly revert from Celsius to Fahrenheit because 100 degrees is so much more exciting than 37.7!

The other thing is that in Spain, if it’s too warm you automatically go indoors, because indoors in Spain is so much cooler. In the UK it’s the opposite, it’s warmer indoors!

Looks like I’ll just have to wait for a much cooler evening to find out what happened to the Saint and the actress!

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10 Books you should read about Marilyn Monroe

Posted on Jul 16, 2016 by Steve Higgins

The very first book I picked up about Marilyn Monroe was the biography by Fred Laurence Guiles. ‘Norma Jean, the life of Marilyn Monroe’. It’s a particularly well researched book and for a great many people, fans and writers alike, it has become the definitive biography of Marilyn, the place you go to find out all those facts and figures about her life, especially her early life. Her death is not really discussed in the same fashion as in later books, some of which are wholly devoted to the mystery of her passing. In my edition which I bought in the seventies, Bobby Kennedy is referred to only as ‘the easterner’ and it was only in later years that Bobby Kennedy and his brother, President John Kennedy became publically identified with Marilyn.

Marilyn: Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer apparently used Guiles book as a guide when writing his own book about Marilyn. Simply called ‘Marilyn, a biography’ the book is a large format book for which Mailer, the celebrated American writer supplied the text, and numerous photographers supplied the impressive array of photographs. The New York Times review online says the book is the ‘Glossiest of glossy books’ and further goes on to remark about the cover picture; ‘Marilyn Monroe has that blurry, slugged look of her later years: fleshy but pasty.’ I’m not sure what the writer was thinking about but personally, I rather like that cover picture of Marilyn.

Goddess A slim volume appeared in 1964 called ‘The Strange Death of ‘Marilyn Monroe’. It was this book that kick started rumours of strange goings on in the hours leading up to Marilyn’s death but the first book I read about the mystery (and I do love modern mysteries) was the book by Anthony Summers; Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe. Summers is a veteran journalistic investigator and has written books about J Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon and the JFK assassination. Was Marilyn murdered or did she commit suicide?

Another author who thinks she was murdered was Robert F Slatzer who wrote a book called The Life and Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe. I couldn’t find my copy when I came to photograph my Marilyn books but I do have it somewhere. Slatzer made a number of claims, one of which was that he actually married Marilyn but her studio bosses forced her to annul the union immediately and remove all the evidence that it ever took place.

Marilyn Monroe: Private and Undisclosed is a book I picked up quite recently. It is written by a British author, Michelle Morgan, and is similar to Fred Guiles book of Marilyn, very well researched but focusses on various people associated with Marilyn who have not been interviewed before. After reading this and other books, I get the impression that Marilyn compartmented her life, and those that were in one compartment, were not necessarily aware of people who were in the other ones.

img_0044_27623392904_o Talking about J Edgar Hoover, here’s another book I picked up about Marilyn. This was a remainder book and concerns the information about Marilyn in Hoover’s FBI files. Marilyn: The FBI Files by Tim Coates. It’s an interesting addition to the many books about Marilyn with pages of FBI files concerning Marilyn, many of them redacted with various names and details blanked out.

Monroe

The Assassination of Marilyn Monroe by Donald Wolfe. Wolfe is a journalist who has done a great deal of digging and research and one of his interviewees was the brother in law of Marilyn’s housekeeper, Eunice Murray. He reveals first hand that Bobby Kennedy was at Marilyn’s home on the day she died.

img_0015_28134392832_o Donald Wolfe wrote another book; ‘The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe’. I’ve not read this one yet, it’s one I’m saving for my holidays.

img_0053_28161186631_o Finally, Fragments, edited by Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment. When Marilyn died in 1962 she left all her possessions to her acting mentor and head of the Actors Studio in New York, Lee Strasberg. When he passed away Marilyn’s effects went to his daughter and now it seems many will be auctioned off. This book is a look at the letters and notes she made, fragments of poems and thoughts scribbled in notebooks, on hotel stationary and envelopes. Marilyn’s thoughts and written meanderings show her to be a thoughtful woman who cared about what she saw and heard. Marilyn was a great reader and left behind a large book collection, part of which is listed in this book. Click here to read about all the 430 books she left behind.

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Death on a Monday Morning

Posted on Jul 9, 2016 by Steve Higgins

This web page announces me as Steve Higgins: writer and Blogger, but writing is something I do in my spare time. I do have a day job. My usual place of work is an emergency control room and this last weekend my team and I have dealt with two fatalities on our night shifts.

quotescover-PNG-31 The first one involved a pedestrian who crossed the M6 motorway running lanes and was hit by a car. Police officers believed he had spent the afternoon and evening at a nearby race course, attended some evening festivities and for whatever reason, decided to walk across six lanes of motorway traffic. Initial reports were for a drunken pedestrian so I can only guess that the man was intoxicated and in that inebriated state made a foolish decision and was killed.

The other death was different. A lady driver spun on the motorway and her car was left sideways on in the carriageway. It was an unlit section of the motorway, it was night or rather early morning. The next vehicle along was an HGV which crashed into her just as she had got out of her car to examine the damage.

As I drove home the next morning I thought about the woman. She may have been on the way to work on an early shift. Perhaps she worked like me in a control room. Perhaps she worked for a transport depot or it could have been anywhere that has 24 hour a day working. I did’t know where she worked or anything about her at all really but I imagined her getting up early, perhaps shutting her alarm off quickly so as not to disturb her partner, if she had one of course. I imagined her getting ready for work, hurrying on to her appointment with death. Perhaps she had a tea or coffee before leaving. I always have a tea and some cereal in the morning or even my favourite fast food- toast. Perhaps she would have said goodbye to her husband. Perhaps not, after all, she would be seeing him later. I can imagine her hurrying if she was late, hurrying to her doom. If only her car had not started.

If she had a car problem she would perhaps have had to call the RAC or AA. They usually take about an hour to arrive. They might have fixed the car after say, thirty minutes or so and she would be back on her way. The spot where she would have crashed would have been full of slow traffic an hour or more later and she would have been forced to slow. Her boss might have told her off, her colleagues might have been annoyed, perhaps they had missed a break because she was late. You can imagine the conversations about that missed hour. Would she have to stay behind after work to make up the time? Would her employer take an hour’s pay off her? Either way, she would be alive and well and would see her husband again at the end of the day. Not now, though.

Strange isn’t it, to look back and think what might have happened? I’ve written posts in the past about James Dean and Marilyn Monroe and as I look at the minutiae of their last hours, I’m sometimes drawn to certain things, certain decisions they made and think, if only they had done this, or that, instead, they might have avoided their fate. Still, you cannot change the past. You cannot undo what has happened.

Later, I found an article in the Manchester Evening News about this fatality. The lady in question was a young woman. She was not on her way to work but on her way home so a lot of my assumptions above were incorrect. Either way, she was killed. Whatever plans she had for the future, nights out, holidays, all gone.

If there is a message there, it is this; wherever you are, enjoy your life and your days on this earth, for they can so easily be taken away from you.

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The Brexit Blues

Posted on Jul 2, 2016 by Steve Higgins

Brexit Blues I suppose I must be a little bit naïve regarding politics because I thought the referendum about the EU had been and gone, was done and dusted and that was that. Before the results appeared, I thought the whole thing was pretty simple: either we would leave the EU or stay in it. Oh well, how wrong I was!

The referendum result has triggered all sorts of things. Firstly the Prime Minister has decided he will stand down and rightly so I suppose. He campaigned hard to stay in the EU so how can he be expected to manage our exit from the EU?

Secondly, and rather strangely, the referendum has also triggered a Labour party leadership election. Not sure why that is but it seems to be a case of Labour somehow ‘lost’ the referendum so now we need a new leader. This is the 21st Century version of political hari-kari. No longer do politicians live to fight another day, now they must fall on their sword, drop by the wayside and give way to a newer leader. Jeremy Corbyn did win a leadership vote by a whopping 60% in 2015 but of course in modern fast moving politics, that no longer matters!

Here are the latest developments- as they happened!

Tuesday.
Jeremy Corbyn has lost a vote of no confidence, Nigel Farage has been booed in the European Parliament (he did tell the European Parliament that basically they are a waste of time and are in denial) and Nicola Sturgeon is already planning to force a new referendum about the Scots leaving the UK. No wonder somebody once said a week is a long time in politics. If you look at the Scottish results as a purely first past the post result, Scotland voted overwhelmingly to stay in the EU. Looking at the actual returns, over a million Scots voted to leave and a million and half wanted to stay, hardly overwhelming was it? Certainly not a mandate for leaving the UK in my book but then Nicola Sturgeon is clearly reading a different book.

Wednesday.
Nicola Sturgeon flies to Brussels for meetings with EU leaders. Although the Scottish MEP Alyn Smith got quite an ovation in the European parliament when he announced that ‘Scotland hasn’t let you down’, Miss or Mrs Sturgeon didn’t quite get the welcome she anticipated. Various individuals urged Jeremy Corbyn to stand down, including former leader Ed Milliband. Corbyn steadfastly refused to bow to the attempted leadership ‘coup’. Good on him I say.

Thursday.
Boris Johnson decides not to try for the Conservative leadership and guaranteed Prime Ministership. (Bit of a surprise, that one.) Michael Gove throws his hat into the ring as did pro leave Home Secretary Theresa May. Interesting: Surely the next PM must be pro Brexit? Jeremy Corbyn is looking more secure as Angela Eagle (any relation to Eddie I wonder) decided to postpone her challenge for the Labour leadership.

Friday.
Angela Eagle is still considering a leadership challenge as is ex-shadow minister Owen Smith but they are still waiting for Jeremy Corbyn to ‘do the right thing!’ Jeremy Corbyn says he does not want to betray the labour members who elected him last year by resigning.
The Daily Mail described Thursday’s events – during which Michael Gove surprisingly announced he was standing for the Tory leadership, rather than supporting Boris Johnson’s campaign – as the party’s “most savage blood-letting since the fall of Thatcher. On a day of extraordinary bitterness, Michael Gove knifed Boris Johnson in the back – ending the former London mayor’s dream of becoming prime minister.”
Some conservatives are now suggesting that Michael Gove should stand down and let Theresa May run unopposed into the leadership of both the country and the Conservative Party. (That’s the same Theresa May that was part of the remain group, like the soon to resign David Cameron, isn’t it? ) Dear me, what has the referendum done to democracy?

One thing that has really surprised me in this referendum is the emergence of two distinctive campaigns, the Remain camp and the Brexit camp. I had thought that politicians would come forward and declare themselves for or against EU membership but I would never have guessed that fully fledged campaigns would emerge, each with their own publicity, leaflets, PR events and even their own ‘battlebuses’. Who paid for these campaigns I wonder?

Acklams Coaches, Beverley E14 ACK Boris Johnson’s Brexit Battle Bus on the sea front in Weston Super Mare. | by Gobbiner

Boris Johnson’s Brexit Battle Bus on the sea front in Weston Super Mare. | by Gobbiner @ Flickr.com

The strange thing is that even in the media there have been calls for the Brexit campaign to come forward with plans for a post EU exit UK. Do people not realise Brexit is not actually a political party? They haven’t won an election, they will not be running the country, in fact nothing has really changed because the same people who ran the country prior to the referendum are still running it!

The other thing that’s interesting is the talk of another referendum, as if we didn’t get the first one right so now we have to have another one! Don’t people understand that there is always a loser in a democracy?

The vote was pretty close, 15 million want to leave and 14 million want to stay, that’s 51.9% against 48.1% but even if it was 70/30 that would still mean 30% of people would be disappointed. Either way, we’ve had the referendum and we voted out, just like the one in Scotland where they voted to stay in the UK.

The previous election didn’t quite go the way I wanted it to but that’s the way of elections. There will always be winners and always be losers. Only a dictator gets all the votes, all the time. After all, everyone voted for Stalin.

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Will the Real Fifth Beatle Please Stand Up?

Posted on Jun 25, 2016 by Steve Higgins

The story of the Beatles is a story that envelops anyone who is interested in music. A whole generation grew up with them and watched them morph from mop tops to hippies and beyond. That same generation was shattered when John Lennon was killed and saddened when George succumbed to cancer. The Beatles have always been there and have always been a part of our lives. It seems to me that there is always something in the media about the Beatles and one thing that comes up time after time is the mysterious fifth Beatle. The fifth Beatle is a sort of honary title bestowed either by the media or the Beatles themselves. We all know who the Beatles were; John, Paul, George and Ringo, so who was the fifth Beatle? Here are a few of the contenders.

Stuart Sutcliffe.
Stuart was a great friend of John Lennon’s and John invited him to join the band despite his lack of musical talent. In fact he couldn’t even play the guitar properly which dismayed Paul McCartney no end. However, John was the creator of the band and the leader. John and Stuart met at Art College in Liverpool where Stuart had a reputation for being a talented artist. Stuart later went to Hamburg with the Beatles where they had a long term gig as the resident band at a club in the Reeperbahn district. There he met and became involved with a young photographer called Astrid Kirchherr and stayed with her when the rest of the Beatles returned to the UK. Sutcliffe enrolled in Hamburg art college to further his artwork. Astrid was a stylish influence on the Beatles and encouraged them to abandon Brylcream and try the now famous mop top haircut which was popular at the time with students in Hamburg. She was studying art and photography and took many famous photos of the group.
Sutcliffe began to experience severe headaches and after one such episode in 1962 he was rushed to hospital. He died on the way there, the cause of death later diagnosed as a cerebral haemorrhage.

Picture courtesy Wikipedia

Brian Epstein.
Brian Epstein was the manager of his family’s music store in Liverpool city centre, NEMS. Epstein worked hard to make the store a success and it became one of the biggest music stores in the North of England. The story goes that a local music fan came into the store and ordered a copy of ‘My Bonnie’ which the Beatles had recorded with Tony Sheridan in Germany. Epstein was curious and made enquiries about the group, later going to see them at the Cavern in Liverpool. Some have dismissed this story, as Epstein was bound to be aware of the Beatles through the local magazine Merseybeat which was on sale in NEMS and featured the Beatles in their second edition. Whatever the original facts are, Epstein liked the Beatles immediately, watched their performances several times at the Cavern and eventually approached them with an offer to be their manager. Brian Epstein went on to manage the Beatles until his death in 1967. His management of their business lives was not too successful as he was perhaps, like everyone, not prepared for the whirlwind global stardom into which the Beatles were catapulted. Marketing and licensing opportunities were lost and other artists that Epstein managed felt that they were overlooked as Brian concentrated on the Beatles.
Brian Epstein died in August 1967. The coroner recorded his death as an accidental overdose.

George Martin.
Brian Epstein made many attempts to get his band a recording contract with little success. One record producer famously told Epstein that ‘Guitar groups are on the way out!’ Epstein persevered and managed to get George Martin, a producer for the EMI label Parlophone to record the Beatles. Martin, who had previously worked on comedy records with stars like Peter Sellers, was reportedly not completely impressed with the Beatles’ music but more so with their wit and banter. Drummer Pete Best did not impress Martin either and he engaged a session drummer to work with the Beatles on their first recordings. That was to have important repercussions for Pete and the band later.

John Lennon and me . .

George Martin paired his formal musical expertise with the Beatles raw talent and in fact either wrote or performed many of the orchestral arrangements on their recordings. The violin quartet on ‘Yesterday’ was one of Martin’s ideas.
He died at the age of 90 in 2016.

Pete Best.
Pete Best joined the Beatles in 1960 on the eve of their departure for Hamburg. He became a popular member of the group, especially with the fans and was noted for his James Dean-like moody good looks.
His mother Mona, had bought a large house in Liverpool that was formerly the West Derby Conservative club and she modelled the basement into a coffee bar which opened in the early sixties as the ‘Casbah’ and Pete played there regularly with his group the ‘Black Jacks’. Paul McCartney spotted Pete there and convinced him to join the Beatles in Hamburg.
On New Year’s Day 1962 the Beatles, including Pete on the drums, recorded fifteen songs as part of an audition for Decca. Decca ultimately rejected the Beatles but Epstein bought the tapes and managed to get George Martin from Parlophone to listen to the tracks. He liked them, offered a possible recording contract to Epstein but wanted to record the Beatles himself first. In June of 1962 the group went to Abbey Road studios to play in the recording studio for George Martin. They played a number of songs but then Martin decided he wanted a session drummer to stand in for Best. Later, the Beatles learned that at the next recording session, planned for September of 62, the engineers still wanted a session drummer so they decided that it was time to replace Best. Their new drummer, Ringo Starr, was also replaced by a session drummer and George Martin has said he was surprised that the group wanted to get rid of Pete. Pete at the time, was the most popular Beatle with the fans. Whatever the ins and outs of the issue, whether it was Pete’s drumming, the fact that he was a bit of a loner and spent little time with the others, or just didn’t fit in well with them, we will never know for sure. The three other Beatles, Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison tasked Brian Epstein with giving Pete Best the sack. He was out and Ringo Starr was in.
Pete Best had missed out by a whisker on global fame and fortune on a massive scale.

Derek Taylor.
Taylor was a journalist who worked for newspapers in the North West. He wrote a review of the Beatles in concert and gradually became a trusted insider and confidante of the group. Later, Brian Epstein asked him to become their press officer. He left the Beatles after their US concert tour in 1964 but returned in 1968 to become the press officer for the Beatles’ Apple Corps. In the late seventies Taylor collaborated with George Harrison on his memoir, ‘I, Me, Mine.’

Derek Taylor died in 1997 while still working for Apple on the Beatles’ Anthology book.

Neil Aspinall.
Neil Aspinall was the Beatles’ road manager and personal assistant and surprisingly, he was originally employed by Pete Best on behalf of the band. Neil drove the band up and down the UK to various gigs in a small Commer van for which he paid £80. Aspinall was a great friend of Pete Best and offered to resign from his work with the Beatles in sympathy with Best’s sacking but Best apparently felt Aspinall should carry on. Later, Aspinall became manager of the Apple Corps when Brian Epstein died. He was the executive producer for the Beatles’ Anthology.
He died in New York in 2008.

Murray the K.
Murray the K was a New York disc jockey in the early sixties. When the Beatles first went to the USA in 1964 Murray was an instant hit with the band. He accompanied them to various events in the US and even broadcast his radio show from the Beatles’ Plaza hotel suite. He claimed to have been named the fifth Beatle by either George Harrison or Ringo Starr and his radio station WINS built him up as the ‘Fifth Beatle’ in their publicity.

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