Famous American Singer Connie Francis At Peshawar’s Lady Reading Hospital

Recently the legendary American singer Connie Frances passed away at age 89. I was not a fan of Ms Francis, but a twist of fate brought me close to her music. Her death brought a flood of memories.

She was a superb vocalist of Italian ancestry. A child prodigy, she started singing at county festivals and fares. By the 1950s and 1960s, she was one of the most recognized, popular and best-selling singers in America. She sold over 100 million records and, in doing so, became among the best-selling artists in history. Two of her best-selling songs were “Stupid Cupid” and “Lipstick on Your Collar.”

Let me clarify one important point: Connie Francis was never in Peshawar or at Lady Reading Hospital, but somehow her music had reached there.

I graduated from Khyber Medical College in 1962. At the time, Lady Reading Hospital was the main teaching hospital attached to the college. I was fortunate to be offered a junior house job in surgery and assigned to the unit of Professor Habib ur Rahman, my favourite teacher and later my mentor.

The new crop of house officers was given accommodations in the New Brierly Ward. The place was located close to Zenana Hospital within the confines of Lady Reading Hospital. New Brierly Ward was not a ward in the true sense of the word but small two-room quarters that one time were used for patients who spent long periods in the hospital. These quarters were not unlike the quarters that one saw for railway staff in the rural areas.

The trouble for the neighbours was that we had only one music record - a small-size 45 rpm that had two songs of Connie Francis

These quarters were built in a row with common walls. Each quarter had two spacious rooms, a small courtyard and a kitchen and a toilet at the far end of the courtyard in each corner. on a wide veranda and on the back to a tiny courtyard. A six-foot wall separated the neighbouring courtyards.

In the next quarter lived Jan Alam and two other house officers. Jan Alam was my class mate in medical college, and after graduation he opted to train in internal medicine. Early in our house job, he acquired a used gramophone. It was the kind that one wound with a handle, put the record on the disc and released the disc brake. As the records started revolving, one would place the sound box and the needle at the very edge of the record. Lo and behold! the song and music would start waffling from the sound horn.

Now, Jan Alam loved the gramophone and played it at all hours when he was not in the ward taking care of patients. The trouble, at least for the neighbours, was that he had only one music record, and that, too, a small-size 45 rpm that had a total of two songs of Connie Francis. On one side was Lipstick on Your Collar and the other side was Stupid Cupid.

It did not take us long to get bored with the two songs being played ad nauseum. We tried to tell him that we liked to hear music wafting over the New Brierly Ward, but we would like to listen to some other music too. He always promised, but either because of his laziness or lack of time to go to the cantonment’s Flea Market to purchase cheap music records, he never did fulfil his promise.

That is when we decided to take matters into our own hands and steal the solitary record from Jan Alam’s quarter. I asked Qayum and Fazal Akram, my two roommates, for help. We decided to climb the six-foot wall separating our quarters, enter his room, find the record and return with the bounty. We helped Qayum climb the wall and straddle it and then pull me up on the wall. We both would then climb down and after retrieving the offending record repeat the process to return to our side. Simple enough, we thought, but as in any clandestine operation, things go wrong – and they did. When Qayum was about to straddle the wall, his glasses fell in the other courtyard. He was blind as a bat without his glasses. Now he was straddling the wall but could not see anything.

Fazal Akram and I consoled him. He wanted to climb down, but could not leave his glasses in Jan Alam’s courtyard. I then climbed on the wall assisted by Fazal Akram and then helped Qayum to climb down on the other side. Without glasses he could not help me, and I decided to jump the wall.

Unfortunately, Jan Alam’s room was locked from inside. Qayum found his glasses that, mercifully, had not shattered. We repeated the steps and returned to our quarter.

For the next 6 months, we had to put up with Jan Alam and Connie Francis.

At the end of my one-year house job in surgery, I left for United States to start an internship in Toledo, Ohio, and gladly left the echoes of “Stupid Cupid” and “Lipstick on Your Collar” behind. 

My first few months in the US were extremely hard. I was constantly homesick. I missed desi music and food. And I longed to talk in Hindko and Pashto, two languages I grew up with. While the availability of desi food was out of question in Toledo at that time, desi music was a possibility. There was a large music store called Sam Goody in downtown Toledo, where, I was told, there was the possibility of buying 33rpm records of desi music.

On my day off, I took the bus to downtown and located the record store. It was a huge store with a main floor and a mezzanine containing rack after rack full of all kinds of music. As I was browsing the store, a salesman asked if he could help in locating the music that I was looking for. I told him that I was looking for Connie Frances’ music. He led me to the section of Connie Frances music.

“Is there a particular record you are looking for?” he asked.

“I am looking for 45rpm record of Connie Frances with Stupid Cupid on one side and Lipstick on your Collar on the other,” I said.

Within seconds, he retrieved the record and handed it to me.

As I was leaving the store with the record, I remembered that I had come to the place to buy records of desi music.

But the nostalgic pull of the record and New Brierly Ward was enough for me to postpone looking for Ravi Shanker, KL Saigal, and Iqbal Bano.