Flyers Fans Turn On Kate Smith After Learning Of Her 1933 Song “Orange Fur Monsters Have Little Peckers”
by Boobie
The Wells Fargo Center in South Philadelphia was besieged by orange- and black-shirted protesters demanding that their Philadelphia Flyers dissociate themselves from early twentieth century singer Kate Smith after a controversial song by the vocalist came to light on Tuesday morning. “It’s just not the kinda thing we want our team to appear to condone, ya know?” said Tony DiNunzio, a season ticket holder since 1987. “It’s not who we are as fans, and it’s not who they are as a franchise.”
Chants of “Out with Smitty, we love Gritty!” rang out in the stadium’s parking lot as fans carried signs bearing Smith’s face either crossed out with a red X or defaced to include a mustache and devil horns or, worse, a penguin beak. At one point, police, many of whom wore orange Gritty pins in silent support of the protesters, had to intervene when a particularly rambunctious young man attempted to start a fire in order to burn a CD he had made with the song’s title written on it (the CD turned out to be blank, a “symbolic offering”).
The song in question, an allegedly satirical number entitled “Orange Fur Monsters Have Little Peckers,” has raised the ire of the fanbase in a way that a another controversial song that thrust the deceased singer into the spotlight last week did not. “‘That’s Why Darkies Were Born,’ that was obviously a joke,” reasoned Tonya Ciccamuccio over the rising din of unrest. “That’s good satire, because it has a certain hyperbolic directness that even decades later is immediately clear. What she said about Gritty is messed up, though, there’s nothing funny about that.”
It’s easy to see her point. First of all, following this season’s trade of longtime fan-favorite Wayne Simmonds to the Nashville Predators, there are no black players on the Flyers roster. Per Sam Carchidi, there are also no black men or women in the Flyers front office or on their coaching staff, so, even if someone did manage to take such silly lyrics as “Someone had to pick the octton/ Someone had to pick the corn/ Someone had to slave and be able to sing/ That’s why darkies were born” the wrong way, the lack of people of color in the organization mitigates the potential harm.
“If someone says the Darkies song is offensive, I just wanna know, you know, to who?” asked “Big Tony” Mussolino, moderator of the long-running Flyers message board It’s The Freakin’ Flyers Over Here! “There’s no blacks in the organization, so who could get mad about it? One of the white guys? Come on. No harm, no foul, that’s what I say. That’s the difference. Gritty, he’s a member of the team. He’s a Philly guy, born and raised in the Spectrum, a South Philly guy just like me. The fact that anyone would say the kinds of things she says in that song about someone like that, even as a joke, it makes me sad, and it makes me angry, and I think you can see here today that a lot of other people in our Flyers familgia feel the same way.”
The song, everyone at the protest agrees, lacks the element of biting social commentary that makes “Darkies” relevant even today. Its message is muddled and ambiguous, and so when Smith sings “They have peanuts on their crotches/ Too dumb for chess, too dumb for checkers/ Fit only to be clowns and beloved by morons/ Orange fur monsters have little peckers,” there is real harm done, not only to Gritty as an individual but to any potential fans, players, coaches, and executives who see elements of themselves in Gritty.
“Kate Smith may be a product of her time, and that may not be her fault, but someone who would say things that like about orange fur monsters don’t need to be celebrated 80 years later. They don’t need to be good luck charms, because we’ve come a long way since then, and we have a long way to go,” said a clearly emotional “Big Tony.” “We haven’t won a cup since the 70s, Kate Smith clearly hasn’t been that lucky. Gritty is one of the only things we’ve had to cheer for over the last couple years. If being welcoming and respectful to him means that we have to stop playing an old tape before games and take down a statue, you know, so be it. It’s a new time, maybe it’s time for new traditions anyway.”
Efforts to reach out to Gritty for comment were denied by the team. Efforts to reach a black person in the organization were met with the response, “There literally aren’t any.”
