1958 Yukon Nuggets

Cool

That's cool. Real cool. What a great word - cool - especially when it has nothing to do with the weather. While slang and pop phrases come and go as fast as a Ferrari, the word cool is more like the energizer bunny. It just goes and goes and goes.

Groovy man. Or hip. Or see ya later alligator. They are all like so yesterday man.

But cool? It's as fresh today as it was in the forties when Charlie Parker recorded Cool Blues, and started the trend to mean alright or good, or - groovy or even - hip.

A national story this week out of New York reminded me how much the word "Cool" means. The writer called the word "the gold standard of slang in the 21st century, as reliable as a blue-chip stock, surviving like few expressions ever could in our constantly evolving language".

Cool is a charter member of the slang hall of fame. It just sits back and keeps getting used generation after generation. True.

My first realization that adults were paying attention to teenage language came in 1958. WHTV, the fledgling closed-circuit television operation had just begun broadcasting to wired homes in Whitehorse. What a concept.

Old movies, announcer-operated bingo games and one daily newscast, read by announcers unskilled in the special art of reading into a self-directed camera, was the bill of fare offered to Whitehorse residents who would shell out cash to watch one channel.

Of course, before the wired one-channel world came into the local homes, residents had to buy a new-fangled gadget called a television set. They weren't cheap and they were black-and-white.

The WHTV manager was Bert Wybrew, who would later become mayor of Whitehorse. Bert was pretty much a one-man show at WHTV in the beginning. He wanted to provide his customers with variety if he could.

I was then a teenage volunteer at the military-run radio station, CFWH. We also bowled in the Whitehorse Inn basement where Bert was the manager. One night, while bowling for Whitehorse, Bert asked me if I would host a teenage dance party on Saturday mornings for WHTV. 'Just like American bandstand', said Bert.

My job would be to round up the usual suspect high-school boys and girls and make sure they showed up at the Whitehorse Inn studios on Saturday morning. Then I would be the on-camera host as Bert played records through the sound system behind the camera.

The studio had room for about eight high-school rock and rollers. I sat behind a home-built desk fancied up by Bert with some artifacts of the day. This was going to be fun - except for one thing. As a teenaged announcer, live on TV in front of my newly rounded up dancers, I was at a loss for words. Literally. I had no idea how to ad-lib. And mike fright turned to stage fright and then to camera fright.

Bert had written me something to read for the opening, which I did. Then he played a Billboard-charted Buddy Holly tune and the dancers went into action. They were - well, they were cool.

When they song ended, I sat there looking at the camera. I had no idea what to say. The ominous silence lasted much longer than live TV would permit.

Finally, gentle Bert stepped out from behind his camera and walked over to the desk where I sat in full stage fright. He put his arm around my shoulder and said:

"You kids are cool, Les. Tell me " What does that word really mean?"

The dancers giggled as I rambled on about how cool it was to be at the WHTV studios hosting the Yukon's first American bandstand - bout how cool we all felt to be on live TV - about how cool the kids at the Whitehorse Elementary High School were every day.

My stage fright disappeared. How cool is that?

A CKRW Yukon Nugget by Les McLaughlin.