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The 1973 film American Graffiti, with that great soundtrack (by George Lucas of Indiana Jones and Star Wars fame) takes place in the summer of 1962.  1962 is the year Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points in a game.  It's the year Marilyn Monroe was found Dead.  It's the year Johnny Carson took over the Tonight Show from Jack Paar.  It's the year of the Cuban Missile crisis and the year James Meredith enrolled at University of Mississippi.  It was also the year I turned 13 becoming an official teenager. 1962 was a great year for movies headed by “Lawrence of Arabia”, “To Kill a Mockingbird”, and “The Miracle Worker”.  It also included a bunch of other good flicks such as the first James Bond movie, “Dr. No”, “Lolita”, “The Manchurian Candidate”, “That Touch of Mink”, “The Birdman of Alcatraz”, “Whatever  Happened to  Baby Jane”, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence”, “Mutiny on the  Bounty”, “The Longest Day”, “Days of Wine and Roses”, “Requiem f...

Larry I met Larry in the Air Force. We both joined up about the same time in April of 1969. We both came in from the New York City (NYC) area but Larry came through the Whitehall Street induction center in Manhattan (the same induction center referred to in the Arlo Guthrie song “Alice's Restaurant”) while I came in through the Fort Hamilton induction center in Brooklyn. Larry was a city kid. He grew up in the Bronx, one of the boroughs of New York City, the only one of the five boroughs on the mainland. I grew up on Long Island which includes Brooklyn. It occupies the southwest corner of the island. Larry and I were inducted within a week or two of each other. We did basic training in barracks that were right across from each other but we never ran into each other as during basic training everyone is pretty much restricted to interacting with the guys in your barracks only. After basic we were both assigned to the same career field, Navigation and Radar Repair and con...

California Here I Come Again 20 Belvedere I n September of 1978 I arrived at 20 Belvedere Street in the Haight-Ashbury District of San Francisco. I was in my little Toyota pickup truck packed full with all my belongings. 20 Belvedere was where my good friend Larry lived and I was set to stay with him and his roommates Robert and Debbie until I got on my feet and found a place to live. 20 Belvedere was a three story Victorian type building, the kind you commonly see in San Francisco and Larry and his roommates were renting the 2 nd floor. It was just a couple of houses off Haight Street and 3 blocks from Golden Gate Park. W hen I first arrived in SF the city seemed so busy and fast paced compared to what I had become used to in Oregon plus I was a little depressed about having to leave Eugene. However, it didn't take me long to adjust, after all, I had spent my first 18+ years in an even faster paced setting, New York and I am not really one to dwell in depr...

Remembering Valerie Valerie dancing at my wedding W hile looking through a box of old photographs I came across a couple of postcards that were sent to me in December of 1979. I had recently been transferred to Sacramento. One postcard was from Louanne and the other from Valerie, two members of the Barrington Gang that had moved from Eugene to San Francisco around the same time I did. Louanne's post card had a picture of a reenactment of the assassination of President Kennedy. Now a postcard of the assassination would be weird enough but a postcard of a reenactment of it? Who thinks something like that is post card worthy? That is just too funny. I've always appreciated Louanne's sense of humor. The picture on the card from Valerie was of a vintage Christmas card which in it's own way was very Valerie. The cards asked about how I was finding Sacramento, informed me they'd be in San Francisco for Christmas, and asked if I might be there as well. ...

My First Record Album I liked listening to music when I was very young but the music I was hearing was the music of my parents or my Aunt. It was around 1957 when Rock-n-Roll began to enter my life. I was maybe 8 when I started hearing a few Rock-n-Roll songs. Rock 'n' Roll wasn't played at my house and the radio stations my parents listened to never played it. My initial exposure to Rock-n-Roll came through the courtesy of others, namely, my friends older siblings who were sometimes listening to it while I was there. The first Rock-n-Roll songs I remember hearing were Danny and the Juniors' “At The Hop”, Elvis' “Hound Dog” and “Heartbreak Hotel”, and Bobby Darrin's “Splish Splash”. I'm sure there must have been others but I specifically remember those. I also remember hearing David Seville's “Witch Doctor” and Sheb Wooley's “Purple People Eater” but those were more cutesy pop songs rather than real Rock-n-Roll. I heard all these songs at oth...

Music and Me Bottom Row:  Me at 4 with my Mom, My Sister and my Grandmother Top Row: My Grandfather, Aunt Lynne, and my Dad F or those of you who have been following this blog, I'm still on my way to California. It's not a short drive and I am taking my time. So, in the meantime I have decided to post a few music based stories. When I first thought about doing a blog about me it was with my nephews in mind, since they mostly knew me through my brother's or sister's eyes but it was just something I thought about from time to time. A number of my friends told me one evening that they just did not get the Beatles so I wrote a piece on why they shouldn't dismiss the Beatles and sent it to them. They knew of course that I really liked music and after they read my piece they suggested I do a podcast on music. I've never thought I spoke very well and if I was going to be talking about music I would want to play it as well. I wasn't sure what ...

Toujours Eugene A last lunch with Frank - an expression of my thoughts about leaving Eugene E ugene was the first place I lived other than where I grew up on Long Island that I thought of as home, and in some ways I still think of Eugene as home. My decision to move to Oregon was partially based on talking with some people I knew from Oregon along with a long strange weekend I spent there up in the hills somewhere east of Medford. That was my lone visit to Oregon and it was when I was in the Air Force stationed at Beale AFB in Northern California. I picked the University of Oregon in Eugene strictly on faith. My research included a write-up about it in a book titled “The Underground Guide to The College of Your Choice”. W hen I arrived in Eugene in 1974 to attend the University there I had never seen Eugene and did not know anyone who lived there but I was eager to claim Eugene as my new home. My first impression of the town and University was positive and I fo...

Invasion of The Long Hairs – Summer of 78 G rease, Saturday Night Fever, Animal House, and Dear Hunter, were among the notable movies in the theaters in 1978. Devo's “Are We Not Men”, The Police's “Outlandos d'Amor”, and of course the Bee Gee's “Saturday Night Fever” were among the notable albums. It was the year of the first cell phone, the Jim Jones led mass suicide in Guyana, and the start of what would become the video game craze with the release of Space Invaders. A nimal House was filmed in Eugene and the surrounding area the previous fall. The famous food fight scene was done in the U of O student union. I happened to be sitting in the union when they started setting up to film that scene. The actors entered and there was a big crowd wanting to get into position to watch. I saw big trays of what looked like hamburgers being moved into the room. That was when I decided to leave. I'm not big on crowds and had not really paid much ...

Joe, My Childhood Bestie Me & Joe - must have been taken our senior year.... I n 1957 I was deemed worthy of entering the 3 rd Grade. The just completed West Hills Grade School opened for business less than a mile from my house. My new teacher was a man, Mr Zaccaria. He was my first male teacher. But the more significantly that was the year when I met Joe. Joe was very friendly and always open to doing things. He would talk freely and openly about most anything. He had a certain street sense about him that you typically did not find in white suburbia. I had never met anyone like him. He was a hard guy not to like. He was Italian and his father was a builder with a reputation for building quality homes. He had built some of the homes in the neighborhood next to ours. Joe's father was a self-made man. He didn't have much formal education and came across as rather gruff but he was no dummy. Joe lived up the hill on the edge of Rollingwood in a house ...

Too Serious playin' hackey sac I was working at Frank's bike shop and had recently rekindled my love of playing sports. When I first moved to Oregon (1974) the only sort of athletic activities I was engaging in involved either a frisbee or a hacky sac. I was not that good at frisbee and to say I was not that bad at hacky sac would be a lie. Hacky sac is really the ultimate counter culture game. It's non-competitive, everyone gets a fair chance, and everyone's supportive with no criticism. In fact, I think that last part could be a rule, although rules are not something us “Peace Love Dove” counter-culture types tend to endorse with rules being so bourgeois and all... I n 1976 I started playing pickup basketball with Frank. I had hardly played any sports since the spring of 1968, the end of my Freshman year at Valparaiso. By the fall of '68 I viewed sports and games as empty diversionary activities that ate up too much of my time. There was to...