March 18, 1965: Eugene Sesky, a truck driver taking bananas from Port Newark, New Jersey to the A&P supermarket terminal in Scranton, Pennsylvania, crashes at the bottom of a hill, just a couple of miles short of his destination, on Moosic Street at Irving Avenue.
A few weeks later, a Greyhound bus, starting in Ithaca, New York and running to New York City, went up that hill, in the opposite direction, as Moosic Street becomes U.S. Route 307. One of the passengers was a 22-year-old New Yorker and folksinger named Harry Chapin, returning home from a gig at Ithaca's Cornell University.
The old man sitting next to him told him about the tragedy. Harry turned it into the song "Thirty Thousand Pounds of Bananas," and put it on his 1974 album Verities and Balderdash, which also includes his best-known song, "Cat's In the Cradle."
Harry Chapin.
I couldn't find a photograph of Eugene Sesky,
only of his grave, which seemed inappropriate to post.
Having heard the story secondhand, at best, Harry got a lot of details wrong as he wrote the song. Sesky was 32, a U.S. Army veteran, and an experienced driver for the Fred Carpentier truck line, so he wasn't "a young driver, just out on his second job." And when he saw that his brakes weren't working, instead of just sitting there in the cab, saying, "God, make it a dream!" he got out on the running board, and waved to the oncoming cars to get out of the way. He died a hero: Although 16 people, most of them in cars, were hurt, Sesky was the only one who died. He also hadn't "lost his head, not to mention an arm or two, before he stopped." The photo above shows that the crash was gruesome enough without adding those incorrect details.
In concerts after releasing the song, Harry would joke that he had trouble finding an ending for it. He said there were 4 different endings. The 1st was a 1923 novelty song: "Oh, yes, we have no bananas!" But his band didn't like it and said, "Harry... " And the audience, familiar with the story, would yell back, "It sucks!" To which Harry, who encouraged singing along with his songs, would say, "Why is it that, every year, you get better at that part?"
So he wrote a second ending, in the style of country music, and again had singalong parts, and ended with the entire crowd singing, "...of bananaaaaaaaas!" According to Harry, that did not persuade his group, and, again, they said it sucked.
To the crowd, Harry would say, "Now, I knew I was in trouble. I said, Chapin, if you can't win with choral magnificence like the second ending, and you can't win with indigenous humor like the first ending, and you don't want to mess with disco bullshit, no matter what, it left only one other option: A quietly qualitative understated Caribbean ending." And he sang an old commercial jingle: "I'm Chiquita Banana, and I'm here to say... "
But the band, without actually saying so, decided that this also sucked, and started playing his first hit, "Taxi," in disco style, with bass guitarist and bass singer Big John Wallace singing it. After one verse, Harry would tell the audience: "Are you gonna tell 'em, or do I have to? Boys... " And, harder than ever, they would yell, "It sucks!"
And so, for the 4th and final ending, Harry went back to the beginning, and told of the old man telling him the story, with the last repetition of the word "bananas" again being dragged out, until the band simulated the sound of a crash. That's the version that ended up on the record.
Of course, Harry would also be killed in a motor vehicle crash, at an age not much older than Sesky, and was no hero in the process: His license was already suspended. Harry had become a hero in raising a great deal of money for hunger relief. But in writing a song involving food, he did no one any favors, least of all the man who was both victim and hero.
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March 18, 1965 was a Thursday. This was also the day that Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov conducted the 1st spacewalk, and the Detroit Red Wings got 10 goals from 10 different players. I have separate entries for those events.
Baseball was in Spring Training. Football was out of season. There was 1 game played in the NBA: The Cincinnati Royals beat the Baltimore Bullets, 113-110 at the Cincinnati Gardens.
There were 2 games in the NHL:
* The Montreal Canadiens beat the Toronto Maple Leafs, 4-1 at the Montreal Forum.
* And the Detroit Red Wings beat the Boston Bruins, 10-3 at the Olympia Stadium in Detroit. The Wings got goals from a record 10 different players. I have a separate entry for that event.
* The New York Rangers and the Chicago Black Hawks were not scheduled.
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