I was looking out the back door at the waving little green plants in my backyard. I looked to the neighbor’s yard to the right, and to the yard to the left of my thirty-three feet wide yard. The grass in both yards had recently been cut. My plants are a variety of weeds and vines my daughter planted. I began to sing the song “The grass is always greener in the other fellow’s yard…”

The grass is always greener

In the other fellow’s yard.

The little row

We have to hoe,

Oh boy that’s hard.

But if we all could wear

Green glasses now,

It wouldn’t be so hard

To see how green the grass is

In our own back yard.

I turned from the door and went to the computer to look up the song. I found an entry on Wikipedia about the children’s television program host “Big Brother Bob Emery” who used to sing the song each day on the program I watched in the 1950’s.

I went to my bedroon to look up the song on Youtube. But then I recalled the story I had seen this morning about a musician who had three hundred songs on Youtube that he had composed and played himself. All of his work was challenged by someone who claimed to own the copyright to the music the man had composed and performed himself. So…I had a negaitve feeling about Youtube. I reached under a dresser where my iPad was charging and went to Spotify to see if I could find the song. There it was in various versions.

The song had come from some Broadway musical in the 1920’s when Big Brother Bob Emery was on radio in Massachusetts. He adopted the song as his theme.

Emory had grown up on a Massachusetts farm in the early 1900’s. He went to a farm school on Thompson’s Island in Boston Harbor. The man was on some of the earliest radio stations in Massachusetts. He had a children’s program on the radio at a time when most of the broadcasters had a children’s story program. A club was set up and many kids sent in membership applications during the 1920’s. Emory transitioned to television in the 1940’s.

I watched his program in the 1950’s. I remember drinking a glass of milk with Emory as he saluted a picture of the US President Eisenhower.



I felt like I was a part of something. I had something to do with the US president. I can still taste the milk. I remember my father saying that Eisenhower proved that the country could run without a president. I didn’t understand at the time that my father was saying that Eisenhower was a ‘do nothing’ nonentity president. I guess sometimes that’s what you need.