James Bond At The Bus Depot

James Bond At The Bus Depot

When Jared Dreyfus and I were both at Tam High and he was aware of my professed desire to stop smoking cigarettes, he decided to assist me. This assistance manifested itself during a morning break.

   In order to smoke at Tam High, one had to walk just outside the gate of the back parking lot opposite The Canteen.  As I passed through the gate I took the pack of Chesterfields out of my shirt pocket and gently tapped it, causing about four cigarettes to protrude.  Pulling one out, I then proceeded to gently hammer the end of it on my other hand to concentrate the tobacco so it wouldn't come apart in my mouth.  I then put that end in my mouth, pulled out a book of matches and lit it.

   I tended to imitate the way my father Blackie smoked which was to take a drag into my mouth then let a fair amount of the smoke out before inhaling.

   "Myers!" a shrill male voice shouted from a short distance away. "What are you doing?"

   It was Dreyfus and he approached me in a relentless manner.

   "Put that cigarette out," he commanded.

   Jar was very much a hero figure in my life.  I dropped the cigarette onto the ground and rubbed it out with my shoe.

   "Now give me the pack," said Jared.

   I gave him the Chesterfields.

   He pulled a cigarette out and handed it to me.

   "Eat it," he said.

   I don't remember arguing with him.  I put the cigarette into my mouth and bit into it.  The appalling sensation was immediate.  My mouth burned as I chewed on the tobacco leaves wrapped inside the paper.

   "All of it," said Jared.

   Into my mouth went the other half of the cigarette.  Jar had an audience of two or three of his classmates watching this spectacle and their laughter was barely contained but he managed to remain poker faced.

   After what can only have been maybe a minute he then said I could spit it out.

   "From now on," he pronounced, "Whenever I see you smoking a cigarette, you're going to have to eat it."

   Interestingly I have no further memories along this line.  I did smoke, probably six months out of each of the four years I was at Tam and no repetition of this incident ever occurred nor was it ever mentioned, except by me.

   Jared was someone I looked up to and the thought of telling him to stick it up his backside never even occurred to me.

   Unlike the Myers family the Dreyfus's had money.  Barney Dreyfus was a highly successful civil rights lawyer and his wife Babbie was someone who played the stock market to her advantage.  So when Jar passed his driving test at sixteen he was given a car and it was a silver Austin Healey convertible, a highly exotic vehicle for an American teenager to own.

   Jared was two years older than me and within the age related social hierarchy of Mill Valley, at this time, it was only our family connection which made us friends.  Also there was the shared experience of political persecution which plagued all my family's friends so it could be said that our bonds were deep.

   These bonds, however, did not stop Jar treating me like a second class citizen when it suited him.  Going for a ride in his Austin Healey was always a fabulous experience.  The smell of the leather seats, the totally British dashboard and the wind in your hair as it raced around with the top down made every ride fantastic.

   But fantastic as every ride was it would always end with him screeching to a halt at some pre-determined spot and saying: "Okay Myers.  Out!"

   He always had someplace better to go while I never really had anywhere I needed to be go.  As his silver Austin Healey would speed off down East Blithedale, I'd be left standing on the sidewalk feeling unimportant.

   It's probably the case that I didn't know how to use my time properly as boredom was a regular phenomenon in my life.  Perhaps if I had been a book reader this might not have been the case.

   The aversion I had to reading books as a kid was pretty comprehensive but there were a few exceptions along the way which mostly occurred while I was in high school.

   In the early 1960s Jared had the job at the Bus Depot which I would later inherit from him.  It involved working behind the counter selling bus tickets, books, magazines and candy bars as well as keeping the shelves stacked, sweeping up and keeping the place in order.

   Whenever you sold a Greyhound bus ticket you had to put it between the jaws of this rather large stamping device which you'd then bang on the top with your fist thus validating it.

   When Jar first worked there it just gave me another excuse to hang around the place.  I had, after all, been hanging around the Bus Depot ever since we arrived in Mill Valley.  It was where I bought all my comic books and read the ones I didn't buy.

   Jar, like my sister Nell, was an avid reader of books unlike me who wouldn't read anything without pictures attached.  He read culturally highbrow material with the same enthusiasm that he devoured pulp fiction and his current passion at this time were the James Bond books by Ian Fleming.

   Bond was, in Jar's opinion, the epitome of cool.  He told me in great detail about the guy: the handmade cigarettes he smoked with three golden rings on the paper, the vodka martini shaken not stirred, the double-O prefix which meant he was licenced to kill.

   Jared had read all the Bond books which had been published though author Ian Fleming was still churning them out annually at this point and his output had become a worldwide publishing sensation.  President Kennedy was one of his biggest fans.  Signet had published all the books with a uniform design for the covers.

   At this stage Jar did not know of my aversion to book reading and it was not something I was proud of.  I would love to have been thought of as well read but I simply wasn't.  I was, however, fairly intelligent, articulate and more than capable of debating things political and artistic so my guess is that he mistook me for well read and insisted I read a Bond book.

   Jar was a hero figure in my life and I was not about to disappoint him so I purchased a copy of Dr. No, the title he suggested to start me off.

   It certainly was not dull though I couldn't help but notice Ian Fleming's tendency towards subtle racism and misogyny.  He seemed to delight in designing elaborate torture sequences and giving the reader a physically realistic account of his hero's survival of these scenarios.   

   How Bond knew it was a centipede crawling up his body in the Jamaican hotel room in the dead of night I'm not sure.  It was, however, an evaluation he made entirely from the physical sensation of the creature crawling slowly up his leg without the aid of seeing it.  Once he'd decided that was what it was, he ran through the risks based on information he had, at some point taken into his consciousness.

   It was details like this which Fleming excelled at.  There was a particularly gruesome encounter which Bond had with a giant squid in Dr. No and again the hero summoned up vital information about the beast which was about to devour him in an almost academic way.  As the massive tentacles weaved their way out of the swirling depths, he clung to a meshed fence and ran what he knew about the giant squid through his fevered mind.  A fifty foot monster with two long seizing tentacles and ten holding ones. They had a huge blunt beak beneath eyes that were the only fishes' eyes that worked on the camera principle, like a man's.  Their brains were efficient and they could shoot backwards through the water at thirty knots, by jet-propulsion.

   Naturally Mister Bond defeated the giant squid but not before Fleming took us to the precipice of his demise.  One could feel the pain of each of the tentacle's suckers as they slapped onto his exposed flesh and exerted a super human strength around his limbs.  The suspense was killing and the author spared us no detail of the battle which was literally life or death.

    I went on to read From Russia With Love next and again found the same scenario in his fight with Nash, the blonde haired agent of SMERSH.  As Nash had told Bond he was going to shoot him through the heart as the train entered the tunnel, our hero managed to sandwich his cigarette case and a book between his heart and the gun at the moment of impact.  Then, playing dead on the floor Bond desperately tried to remember simple anatomy.  Where did the main artery run in the lower body of a man?  The Femoral.  Down the inside of the thigh.  His next challenge was to release the flat-bladed throwing knife from his attaché case which was only millimeters from his right hand.  The first violent stab of the knife had to be decisive.

   And decisive it was but not before Fleming had taken us through every tiny detail of Bond's ordeal right up to Nash's body suddenly relaxing once the ten pints of blood had drained from his body.

   The third book I read was Goldfinger and I believe I did so on Jared's advice.  Interestingly it was these three which were the first Bond films in that order.

   Once the film Dr. No starring Sean Connery came out the actor became the character in my mind and I never read another Fleming book after until years later.  It was also years later that I told Jared about my childhood book phobia and he was amazed. 

   I loved those first three Bond movies but the fourth, Thunderball got on my nerves as it seemed to be all gadgets and wise cracks so I never saw another until Connery came back in Diamonds Are Forever.

   I don't believe that James Bond was a subject I ever discussed with Jared again.

Remembering Mack The Knife.

Writing about the Mill Valley, Marin City and Sausalito of the 1950s and 60s poses certain problems.  

   Sociologically the Marin County of today is very different from what we knew growing up. In Mill Valley the mountain and the high school campus remain largely unchanged but that's where the similarities end.   

   I personally find popular culture helpful in recapturing that about the society which was fleeting. Pop music, movies, comic books and candy bars are all good markers and in remembering them you often recall other things too.

   In this instance I'm hoping to recapture the autumn of 1959 so I'm going to start with Bobby Darin's recording of Mack The Knife which came out while I was in Mr. Healy's seventh grade class at Edna Maguire. I had no context for judging this song, being totally ignorant of The Threepenny Opera by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. I simply fell in love with the swinging big band sound of Darin's record.

Oh the shark, babe, has such teeth dear,

And he shows them pearly white,

Just a jack knife has old Mack Heath, babe,

And he keeps it out of sight,

   This record was, for me, the most exciting thing to hit the top 40 for a long time as was Poison Ivy by The Coasters. By this time I was no longer a record buyer or collector but mainly someone who heard these songs on the radio and the Top 40 at this time was an interesting potpourri.

   El Paso by Marty Robbins, Neil Sedaka's Oh! Carol,

Running Bear, Teen Angel and Sweet Nothin's by Brenda Lee. Elvis Presley released Stuck On You and Alley Oop was a hit for the Hollywood Argyles. Johnny Mathis gave us Misty and Sam Cooke sang Wonderful World.

Don't Know much about history,

Don't know much biology,

Don't know much about a science book,

Don't know much about the French I took,

But I do know that I love you,

And I know that if you loved me too,

What a wonderful world it would be,

These were just a few of the great records which came out during my time in seventh grade.

   Mr. Healy was one of the best teachers I ever had and I do wish I had encountered more like him but, alas, I did not. He taught English and History and for him I worked hard and enjoyed it. I remember he drew armies of stick-men on the blackboard while explaining the Russian strategy for defeating the Germans in WW2. He also printed neatly in capital letters, a habit I picked up from him. For more years than I care to remember I copied Mr. Healy's style of printing in capitals. The habit was finally broken when I took a French evening class in the 70s which required me to revert to upper and lower case. 

   Making the transition from Alto to Edna Maguire was exciting. For the first time we had two teachers. Our home room teacher was Mrs. Gustavson who taught maths and science. She was okay but didn't get my attention the way Mr. Healy did. In fact the things which really got my attention at this time were movies, pop music, Uncle Scrooge comic books and MAD magazine. I had been an avid reader and collector of MAD since 1956 and I loved its anarchic humour. At this time I didn't know anyone my age who read it. Mr. Healy's wife worked in an advertising agency and he told us that her colleagues were all overjoyed when one of their ads was lampooned by MAD.

   Although Elvis Presley had been in the army for over a year he was still producing records like A Fool Such As I and A Big Hunk Of Love. Over the summer vacation Ray Charles released a record which was to become a must for every band playing dances in Marin: What'd I Say with its infectious oohs and ahhs.

   Among my favourite movie stars was Jimmy Stewart even though I knew about his right wing politics. We received all our Hollywood gossip from the Hallinans who tended to describe movie stars with liberal political leanings as "good guys."  So actors like Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Henry Fonda and Gregory Peck were all good guys while John Wayne, Robert Taylor and Ginger Rogers were not.

   Jimmy Stewart's performance in Otto Preminger's Anatomy Of A Murder was absolutely fantastic and I loved that movie but his next one, though entertaining, caused me to be unsettled.

   In Mervyn LeRoy's The F.B.I. Story, Stewart played the fictitious federal agent Chip Hardesty in one of the most blatant pieces of political propaganda Hollywood ever produced. Without giving any proper context we saw Stewart and his colleague, Murray Hamilton, rounding up a truck load of Ku Klux Klansmen, arresting a banker for exploiting Native American Indians and closing in on John Dillinger.

   The film was narrated by Stewart in his persuasive drawl and had as many light moments as serious ones such as Jimmy and wife Vera Miles decorating the tree at Christmas. The presence of J. Edgar Hoover hovered over the story like some kind of saint who, when he took over, got the bureau to shape up and become the brave protector of all that was decent in American society.

   After Stewart and another agent managed to foil some Nazi plot in South America his voice over returned to tell us that the war was now over…"But not for the F.B.I. Now the enemy was international communism. It threatened education, labour and management, church and the home. And yet, communists could be found in all these places. They gave speeches, wrote pamphlets, stirred up trouble. Some of them weren't that polite. They betrayed their country."

    What followed this highly convincing narration was a cat and mouse surveillance of someone involved in espionage. Now I know that this kind of movie was not a problem for very many of the kids I went to school with but for my family and all of our closest friends the F.B.I. was not the great protector that Jimmy Stewart was sawing on about.

   One of the most effective and pernicious elements of the post war anti-communist witch hunts was the equation that socialism, communism or even liberalism would lead inevitably to totalitarianism.

   Movies like I Married A Communist showed a man who tried to leave the party being dragged off and forcibly drowned. I doubt very many people actually believed such nonsense but a visit from a pair of federal agents asking questions about your neighbours could have a pretty unsettling effect.

   Just such a visit had frightened our landlady in Connecticut so badly that we had to leave our house and come west. According to my mother the woman was very upset and apologetic but these guys scared her.

   We also saw first hand the kind of persecution that befell the Hallinans in the wake of Vin taking on the legal defence of another family friend, Harry Bridges, so we were all too aware of the role the F.B.I. played in the cold war hysteria which had engulfed the nation. The cozy, engaging and noble picture that Jimmy Stewart's movie painted was so far from the reality we knew about as to be laughable but nobody was laughing.

   This was a big budget Warner Brothers production in technicolor with a musical score by Max Steiner and, as far as I could make out, this movie was a big hit.

   They also brought out a Dell comic book to promote it which I soon discovered at the Bus Depot as I regularly surveyed and read most of the comics that came in.

   The marketing of comic books was not unlike that of selling movies. The cover had to grab you and the cover for The F.B.I. Story was dramatic with the shadow of a machine gun wielding federal agent on a door. As I recall it wasn't terribly well illustrated inside which was the case with many of the movie comics that Dell produced. There wasn't the kind of consistency you got with Uncle Scrooge.

   Dell comics also published Uncle Scrooge, written and illustrated by Carl Barks but sold to the likes of me as the creation of Walt Disney. Scrooge McDuck found himself in a contest with Flintheart Glomgold to be money champion of the universe.

   Glomgold was, like McDuck, a waddling white feathered bird who wore a cap that looked Scottish. He was similar to Uncle Scrooge in three ways: he had a pair of spectacles which balanced on the bridge of his beak, he too wore spats over his webbed feet and he, like his rival, did not wear trousers.

   If ever there was a benevolent caricature of capitalism it was Uncle Scrooge whose avarice was always a source of amusement.

   Although Disney himself was very right wing he never allowed politics to interfere with his story telling. There were war comic books in the 1950s which often made villains of the Chinese, Russians and Eastern Europeans but I was never interested in these.

   Another movie which came out about this time was Pillow Talk starring Rock Hudson and Doris Day. It also had a smaller role played by Tony Randall. I loved this movie along with millions of others.

   Doris Day had been a favorite of mine ever since Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much and Calamity Jane.

   Thanks to the Hallinans and their Hollywood gossip we knew that Rock Hudson was gay but that simply made his screen persona that much more interesting. This movie, all about the idiocies of the advertising world, was so well crafted in every department and Tony Randall's turn as the poor little rich kid owner of the agency was hilarious.

   So remembering 1959 isn't all that difficult if you spent as much time as I did watching movies at the Sequoia, reading comics at the Bus Depot and hearing the latest records at Village Music.  

Of 'Pantsing' And Presidents

At what point does a noun become a verb? The plural noun in question is the word 'pants,' meaning trousers and the verb is the very same, meaning to pull someone’s pants down.

   I’m sure that the ritual of 'pantsing' was not unique to Mill Valley in the late 1950s and early 60s but a ritual it was indeed. The victim of a 'pantsing' was never a six foot Clark Kent lookalike. No. It was invariably someone a bit weedy, small and physically immature. During 1960 that someone was me. This would be my thirteenth year alive but to somebody unfamiliar with me, I probably looked between nine and ten.

   Young men of this age are beginning to shave, their voices are deepening and, terribly important to their status in a locker room, they have pubic hair. On all three of these fronts, I was a serious latecomer, a fact which made me burn with self consciousness.

   In my mind I was not a microscopic wimp but rather a dashing and attractive sort of person who had beautiful women fawning over him. The gap between these two realities was the size of an ocean but one should never underestimate the human mind's ability to kid itself.

   There were a fair few young men at school who did fall into the he-man category and they tended to hold court so in this arena I became kind of a court jester. I was always an entertaining character to have around. A little guy with a loudspeaker voice and sometimes witty banter.

   I was in eighth grade and my main teacher was Miss Huguet who I liked. I was no longer a record collector, at least not of pop music, but I did hear all the Top 40 hits on the radio and through the repetition that this kind of brainwashing brings, knew them all by heart.. While Elvis had been in the army it didn't stop his recording career at all but the records he was putting out didn't excite me the way his early material had. Are You Lonesome Tonight? just didn't have the raw fire of All Shook Up or Hound Dog.

   In fact most of the popular music at this time was pretty banal. A few numbers like Save The Last Dance For Me and Poetry In Motion were okay but the majority of the hit records did not excite me.

   This was also the time of the presidential election between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon.  Kennedy's nomination at the Democratic Convention in July had caught my attention from a couple of angles. One was the daily Chronicle which I was in the habit of reading when the news interested me. The other was what I heard from my parents, Blackie and Beth. Through these two sources I gleaned that John Kennedy's father had bought him the Democratic nomination.

   My father did not hate many people but prominent amongst that small group he did actually despise was Joseph Kennedy. I never interrogated Black about Joe Kennedy but have since learned that he had been appointed to head Roosevelt's Maritime Commission in 1937 which was a time that my father was a prominent and active vice president of the radical National Maritime Union.

   I can only guess at what specifically made Blackie hate this man but hate him he did.

   So it was natural enough that Black would be more than a bit sceptical about young Jack Kennedy and as for Nixon he had utter contempt for him. Nixon had made his name politically as part of J. Parnell Thomas's House Un-American Activities Committee.

   The sight of young Dick Nixon and Robert Stripling earnestly examining microfilm allegedly found inside a pumpkin on Whitaker Chambers' farm is laughable now but in those dark days of the witch hunt, most Americans took this amateur dramatic performance seriously. They also fell for Nixon's 'Checkers' speech in which he skilfully sidestepped all the accusations which had been made against him and concentrated on irrelevant details of his personal finances building to the emotive climax of insisting that they would keep Checkers the dog. The film in which he made this speech went down so well with the American public that he was cleared to remain on the ticket as Eisenhower's V.P. 

   Nixon had been christened 'Tricky Dick' by Helen Gahagen Douglas who ran against him for the California senate seat in 1950 after Nixon had consistently smeared her as "The Pink Lady." His campagn posters all said "The man who broke the Hiss Case!" Nixon's campaugn of innuendo worked and he won the contest.

   Interestingly Jack Kennedy and Nixon both entered national politics at the same time as junior congressmen and they also both ran for the senate in 1950.

   I remember Blackie saying that there were a few good things about these two. They were both young which he said was a good thing and Kennedy, if elected, would be the first Catholic president which he also seemed to consider a good thing.

   I never saw the television debates as we were still living up on Seymour Avenue and didn't have a set but I did read all about them. I took an active interest in the election probably because of my parents whose close friends all constantly talked politics.

   The hand of Joseph P. Kennedy was all over young Jack's campaign. Joe had had presidential ambitions of his own until FDR fired him and from that point on his political focus shifted to his sons. He marketed young Jack like a packet of corn flakes and selling was something the elder Kennedy knew everything about.

   The formula for JFK's campaign was built around image. Jack Kennedy was a good looking guy who spoke well and was the product of the best education that money could buy. In the debates he looked good while Nixon came across as sweaty and unshaven. JFK was also skilled at sounding confident while promising nothing and his example has been replicated ever since by politicians all over the world. In fact when Nixon ran successfully for president in 1968 he had learned all of his old rival's tricks.

   Perhaps it was the dishonesty in the political arena which fascinated me so but my interest in politics was not something I shared with my friends at school. At Edna Maguire my over riding ambition was to be liked.

   There were a few exceptions like the time that Caryl Chessman was executed at San Quentin. I followed this story closely and became a passionate advocate of clemency for this man. I joined in a class debate on capital punishment and, as I recall, we won.

   At some point during my eighth grade year I was part of the school team debating Red China's admission to the UN. John Elder, David Einstein and I won this debate on the side of China's admission even though one of the judges, Miss Huguet, disagreed with practically every political position I ever took, but had to concede that we put our case more effectively.

   I had Miss Huguet for social studies and liked her enormously but we used to have very colourful arguments. She was an unquestioning conservative politically. I remember taking exception to her telling the class that Castro was "just a jerk." One time I arrived late in the morning for some reason to find her prattling on and as I entered, the entire class groaned because they knew I'd argue with what she was saying.

   The reality was that nobody was interested in politics which, I have found, is a pretty universal state of affairs. What my friends were interested in was sex, smoking cigarettes, rock and roll records and cars.

   I longed to be cool but being thirteen and looking nine was a considerable handicap. I was friendly with several of the hard guys at Edna Maguire. Jimmy Tamburini seemed to be top banana amongst them. Jim was tall, very good looking and tough. He and his colleagues all wore a kind of uniform which consisted of jeans, black shoes, a black collarless sweater which was worn over a white tab collared shirt. The shirt was buttoned up and snapped. The crowning effect was the pompador hairstyle kept aloft by much Brylcreem.

   One sign of being cool was to wear horseshoe taps on the heels of your shoes but Edna Maguire had a rule that these could not be worn to school as they would scratch the floors. It was a very distinctive noise made by horseshoe taps unlike the small ones which would go on the corner of the heel.

   Jimmy Tamburini's uniform was worn by a gaggle of guys. Mike Chirco, the Cleland brothers, Wayne and Mike, Garret Testes and Johnny Lem. Whether they were a gang or not I didn't know but they could always be found in a group and usually walked home from school along the railroad tracks at Alto.

   My brother Jim and I usually found ourselves tagging along as we had to go the same way and we were used to walking to school with Garret in the mornings.

   There was never any doubt that we were separate from these guys but for some reason our presence always seemed welcome. My guess is that we were a good audience for the stories these characters would come out with, the veracity of which was always questionable. I know that Jim, in particular, could fall about laughing each time he'd repeat something funny one of the hard guys had said.

   One lazy afternoon brother Jim and I walked down Lomita Drive from the school along with Garret Testes and a few other hard guys. I almost certainly would have pulled my pack of Chesterfields out of my shirt pocket and lit a cigarette. Jim never smoked at this time. Down where Lomita turned left we joined the railroad track and carried on towards the Purity at the junction of Camino Alto and East Blithedale.

   The hard guys were rather thick on the ground this day. Among their number was Craig Bird, Jimmy Tamburini and probably about another seven or so, all dressed in the uniform collarless black sweaters.

   I have no memory of who was boasting but there had to be an entertaining yarn or two being spun to keep this crowd entertained as it moved up Blithedale turning left on Locust and down to Sycamore where another left was taken.

   There was a small wooden house on the right hand side of Sycamore which must have belonged to one of these guys and the crowd, including Jimmy and I ascended the steps and entered. As we walked into the living room somebody said: "Get Myers!" I was grabbed from behind while someone else pulled my trousers and underpants down.

   As I lay, partially naked, on this living room floor I could see the faces of all these guys staring quietly at me. It didn't last long but long enough. I guess they wanted to satisfy their curiosity that I hadn't yet reached puberty.

   As they turned away I pulled my trousers back up and Jimmy and I left. I never heard a single word about this incident from any of the participants or anyone else. It hadn't happened in a public place so if it became public knowledge I certainly never heard about it.

   One of the reasons that I was of interest at school was that I had a talent for drawing. I was also a confident performer of sorts in spite of my size but all of this counted for nothing when it came time to 'pants' me in that little house on Sycamore.

   I was little and they were big and the law of the jungle prevailed. I suspect, though, that their pantsing of me was not something which made them feel proud.

The Week The Beatles Conquered America.

This is a Miller Avenue Musings re-run.

By the beginning of 1964 I had stopped buying singles altogether but this didn't keep me from dropping into Village Music for a regular chat with Sara Wilcox. I did buy records at this time but they tended to be comedy or film soundtracks.

   The shop had moved from the Sequoia Theater building up to one of the new units on Blithedale just about where it made the transition from East to West.

   Sara was the nicest person that I ever encountered in any of the stores in downtown Mill Valley. She was smart, funny, beautiful, impeccably dressed and it didn't matter to her whether I bought anything or not. She enjoyed telling me all about the record company parties she regularly attended and her yarns were never dull.

   She spoke the jargon of professional sales and of the business she was in but her syntax was original and her stories were very funny.

   John Goddard, who I didn't know at this time but who subsequently bought the business from her, tells me that she was a reliable and entertaining source of dirty jokes and I certainly would have been open to hearing them and maybe I did but it isn't a detail which sticks in my memory. What I do remember was that she was constantly amused by the ludicrous lengths the record companies would go to in promoting their products and, as she was regularly attending record biz shindigs she always had a new tale to tell.

   My singles buying fizzled out throughout the year of 1958. I know I bought Tequila by the Champs and loved its infectious rhythm. I also had a few discs by Chuck Berry, The Everly Brothers and Jerry Lee Lewis but by 1959 I simply heard the records on the radio rather than buying and collecting them. This didn't prevent me being brainwashed with all the new releases, some of which I liked and many of which I didn't. It is with profound irritation that I know many of these songs by heart to this day. Top of my 'Most Hated' list would have to be Tell Laura I Love Her by Ray Peterson. I despised everything about this song: The shameless melodrama, the whining crybaby voice and the ghastly use of sentiment combined to make it totally loathsome. It was, however, a well crafted number which got in your head and wouldn't go away.

   The early sixties played host to a mix of popular musical styles. Folk music was represented by the Kingston Trio as well as Peter, Paul & Mary. Surf music came in the form of the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean and there were dance crazes like the twist and mashed potatoes but, though I heard all this music on the radio I had become a passive listener.

   I remember being surprised by the film of Bye Bye Birdie which came out in early 1963 as it reminded me of the hysteria which had surrounded Elvis around the time he got drafted. Screaming girls were not something which accompanied any of the popular music of the early 1960s and Bye Bye Birdie reminded me that such a phenomenon had once existed.

   So I popped into Village Music one day after school in early February, 1964 and what should Sara be telling me about but this new British band on Capitol called The Beatles. She'd been to a reception and been given this roll of stickers with four mop topped hairdos and the slogan: The Beatles Are Coming!

   I had a look at the album cover and was immediately struck by the fact that the four Beatles all had haircuts like Moe Howard in the Three Stooges. That took a bit of getting used to as Moe was my least favourite Stooge. He was the bully amongst them who was constantly dishing out hideous punishments like eye jabbing and hitting over the head with hammers.

   The photo on the back had their names and I saw that Paul McCartney looked very much like my school friend Johnny Lem. Also the drummer was named Ringo like Ringo Hallinan. In fact another Ringo had been in the charts recently which was a single by Lorne Greene the star of television's Bonanza.

   I don't think Sara played the album for me but I soon heard I Want To Hold Your Hand on the radio and was very taken by it. I'd never come across a song about holding hands before and it seemed to speak to me about being a teenager. I was, at this time, sixteen.

   I certainly wasn't overly fascinated about The Beatles until the Friday night of this particular week. I was at our house on Catalpa getting ready to go out to a dance in Sausalito. I'd shaved what little beard I had and doused my face in English Leather. The television sat right next to our front door and Walter Cronkite was reading the news as I was about to exit. He reported the arrival of The Beatles at JFK Airport. I paused to watch hoardes of screaming girls and these four skinny guys with pudding bowl hairdos running down the steps from their plane. They were all laughing.

   This was the same phenomenon that Bye Bye Birdie had reminded me of with Elvis and had not been seen by me since.

   I delayed my departure long enough to watch all of the report and when it was finished, Walter Cronkite gave a caustic glance to the camera and said: "And that is what some people consider to be news. Good night."

   I have little memory of the dance in Sausalito except that the hall was up the hill above Bridgeway, the main drag through the town. The band might have been The Jesters which my friend Mark Symmes played drums for. If so their repertoire would have included such numbers as What'd I Say by Ray Charles. Within a few weeks that would be turned on its head as all the musical combos in Marin County would struggle to learn every number the Beatles recorded. This, however, was Friday night and the true conversion for millions of American teenagers would not come until Sunday when the Beatles made their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show.

   The Jesters were a fine group. Dave Shallock played lead guitar, Gary Fay rhythm and Jim Michaelson was on bass. In addition to playing the drums my friend Mark also sang as did, I think, all of them. They looked good and were always highly professional. Another classmate of mine who was a musician and always had a band working the dance halls was Bill Champlin. Bill and Mark Symmes were both dedicated students of Mister Greenwood who ran the music department at Tam High. They were both in his marching band. Another disciple of Mister Greenwood's was George Duke whose jazz trio was working professionally throughout his years as a student at Tam.

   One more schoolmate of mine was part of this musical club and that was Billy Bowen who I'd known well when we were in grade school at Homestead. I remember seeing Bill walking home from Village Music in the late 1950s carrying a Chuck Berry album and when I asked him why he had a whole album he told me it was to practice his drums to.  

   The thing which makes this particular dance at Sausalito something of a mystery to me is the fact that I'm pretty certain I went alone and without alcoholic enhancement. The usual routine for the weekend was to find a way to secure enough booze to become blotto then stagger onto the dance in Mill Valley in the hope that your inebriation would give you the courage to successfully pick up a young lady. The fact that this scenario never seemed to work out in no way discouraged me from trying again and again.

   One of the most stunningly beautiful young women in my year at Tam was Hollis Hite, someone I had an agonizing crush on ever since I had first met her. It must be mentioned here that I was tiny, looked much younger than my sixteen years and had become accustomed to the dreadful syndrome of unrequited love. I was constantly falling in love with unattainable women. Inside I was a handsome athletic movie star but the physical reality of my presence was something less impressive. I was so far from cool it made me ache.

   However, I happened to be pretty good friends with Hollis Hite and simply had to keep my feelings secret. She was, at this time going out with another pretty good friend of mine, Bruce Crawford. Bruce, unlike me, was tall, blond, extremely handsome and easy going in a way that I was not. 

   By the time Sunday came around I found myself up at Hollis's to watch the Ed Sullivan Show. Bruce was there along with Christy Flagg and Chuck Collins.

   Ed Sullivan's show was one of those American institutions in the 1950s and 60s. He had a face like a pickle and the weirdest speaking voice. He always pronounced the word show like 'shoe' and seemed to be the most unlikely fellow to be in the entertainment business but in it he was. He and Steve Allen had a deadly rivalry for ratings being on opposite networks.

   There was nothing remarkable about The Beatles' first appearance on the Sullivan show except the screaming was pretty loud. As the camera did close-ups, the name of each Beatle would appear and I think by the end of the evening I knew John, Paul, George and Ringo by sight.

   They were something totally different. Their press conferences were terribly funny and they took delight in making fun of their inquisitors. In spite of the Moe Howard hairdos they seemed to have much more in common with the Marx Brothers than the 3 Stooges. 

   Their witty replies to the asinine questions of the American press were made all the more colorful by their thick Liverpool accents.

   From my perspective the Beatles seemed to take America in one week and by the end of that week I was, like everybody else, a Beatlemaniac. I bought the LP Meet The Beatles and just loved their songs. Paul McCartney had the most amazing rock and roll voice as demonstrated on I Saw Her Standing There and John Lennon's vocals had such a lyrical quality. Their songs were all about the agonies of teenage love but in a new and original way.

   Coming, as I did, from a highly non-conformist family, I did not often find myself going with the flow when it came to popular culture so it was a strange kind of liberation to be swept along with everybody else in total admiration for the Fab Four.

   I Want To Hold Your Hand went to number one which was soon followed by She Loves You and Please Please Me. 

   Before long the other British bands began landing on our shores. The Kinks were great even though all their songs seemed to have the same riff.  Much publicity was made of The Dave Clark Five but they were so mediocre that they faded fast. The Animals, Gerry And The Pacemakers, Herman's Hermits, Billy J. Kramer & The Dakotas, Peter And Gordon, The Zombies and Donovan all came across in what soon was referred to as the British Invasion. I remember a photo of The Rolling Stones was published in the Chronicle under the headline 'Here come five more!' They looked so ugly I couldn't imagine ever liking them.

   It is difficult to under estimate the cultural impact which The Beatles had on the United States at this time and their huge success was to change show business and the media in fundamental ways.

   Probably the most amazing thing about The Beatles was the fact that they kept coming out with amazingly fresh and memorable new sounds for several years to come and, together with Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, The Byrds and countless sixties groups, provided the soundtrack for my teenage years.

   Of course there was more to come. The Vietnam War and the emergence of drugs within the white middle class of America stirred up a complex brew which gave that time a unique place in our history.

   But The Beatles came along before the confusions of the drug culture wrought such carnage and the horrors of Vietnam got out of control. For that brief moment in time these four giggling Liverpudlians led us, like the children of Hamlin, away from our otherwise undiluted Americanism. We would never be the same again.

Hanging Out At The Old Bus Depot

This is a Miller Avenue Musings Re-Run.

My two sisters probably spent most of their free time at the library up on Lovell but for me the three locations which I returned to with all the regularity of a devoted church goer was Village Music, the Sequoia Theater and the Bus Depot.

   It's interesting to me to see how little is known by the younger residents of today's Mill Valley about the Bus Depot. I suppose my generation of Mill Valley kids were equally ignorant about the trains which originally ran in and out of town. That's the problem with progress. The old gets torn down, built on and a way of life is forgotten forever.

   The main reason I was in the bus depot so much was the comic book rack which sat opposite the main counter as you entered from the Thockmorton side. I bought and collected a lot of comic books but they were only a small percentage of the ones I read for free. I never purchased Archie, Little Lulu, Casper and countless other titles, but I read them all.

   I was also on a first name basis with the ladies who worked there from a very early age. I knew Margo and Brun pretty well and they tended to give me special dispensation with regard to comic book reading whereas most boys were told to put the comics back.

   Over the years I spent a lot of time in the bus depot. Whenever my brother Jim and I found ourselves downtown that's the place we'd hang around.

   Sometime in the very early 1960s Jimmy and I became friendly with one of the Greyhound bus drivers. We got to know him through Margo who Jim thinks had a crush on him. He was a very good looking guy about thirty five and he was always a happy sort. His name was Arleigh. We took to spending Sunday afternoons down around the depot and Arleigh would let us sit in his parked bus while he awaited his next departure.

   Over time when we were off school Arleigh would let us ride into the city and back on his bus but we had to be careful not to get caught because the Greyhound Company hired spotters to ride the buses checking up on the drivers. Arleigh always gave us tickets and we had to pretend we didn't know him on these journeys.

   The usual route was out through Tam Valley, making a stop at Marin City which was where you would change to go north to San Rafael or Novato. The bus would  then continue on through Sausalito and across the Golden Gate Bridge. Once we were through the tollgate, we'd take the second exit off the freeway by the Palace of Fine Arts then on up Lombard Street with its endless parade of motels to Van Ness where the bus would hang a right. Van Ness took us over the hill then it was left on Golden Gate. The final leg of this journey was to cross Market at 6th, go around the corner to 7th and into the depot where there was a special angled parking space for the Mill Valley buses.

   Amongst our toys from very early on was a fleet of small Greyhound buses and I can remember running one of these in and out of Bearville, the imaginary town which my brother and I constructed for our sizeable teddy bear collection.

   I had a medium sized Greyhound Silverside which would come along the top of a concrete wall just below our front lawn and stop for a gaggle of imaginary bears on their way somewhere important.

   Apart from pretty regular car journeys with my father to the San Francisco waterfront on Saturdays, the usual form of transport to the city for us was the Greyhound bus which ran on the hour out of the Depot. Most of our early trips were with my mother Beth who would buy the tickets across the counter. There was a huge stamp that Margo or Brun would bang with their fist once the tickets were within its jaws.

   The drivers all wore a pretty smart military looking uniform. Grey shirt with a tie, matching grey trousers and each man, for I never saw a woman driver, had a military style hat which he would or would not wear. Attached to their belt was a leather holster which held the driver's individual ticket punch. The mark that was made by the punch was never the same and, thus, later identification of the driver could be made.

   Great play was made in Greyhound advertising copy about leaving the driving to them and, doubtless, the daily commute in and out of Mill Valley must have been a relatively painless business. Longer journeys, however, were a different story. I remember becoming impossibly bored and constrained on long Greyhound journeys like one we went on to New Mexico in 1958 .

   It was while sitting in his bus one day that we met one of Arleigh's colleagues who was named Ernst Heinemann. Ernst was very tall, dark haired and German. We learned that Ernst had been in the Hitler Youth as a kid and told us, quite calmly in his excellent English that Hitler had his good points as well as his bad.

   Ernst didn't feel the persecution of the Jews was a good thing but the concept of full employment and sense of purpose he saw as positive.

   Now my father Blackie had a very strong prejudice against Germans in general which was interesting because it was the only nationality he seemed to hold a grudge against. It was clearly to do with the Nazis for he didn't feel that way about the Italians or Japanese. He always told me that the Italians made 'lousy fascists' as their hearts weren't in it, whereas the Germanic character fitted the mold perfectly in his opinion.

   One of the many realities of the 1950s that Black had no enthusiasm for was the post war rehabilitation of the Germans. Werner Von Braun was not seen in our house as a new hero of the space race but as a Nazi scientist who invented the bombs which rained down on Britain during the war.

   One restaurant our family never even considered going to was the Mountain Home Inn with it's Germanic décor and draft beer served in big metallic mugs. I can only guess that Blackie hated the huge success that Volkswagen beetles and camper vans had in America during the sixties.

   I don't believe that either Jim or I ever mentioned our friend Ernst to Beth or Blackie but, I suspect, that if Blackie met him he would probably like him as we did.  

   One of the difficulties of growing up in a family where politics played such a strong role was the fact that most people hardly ever thought about politics at all. It just never came up with my friends at school. So, for me, this bag of political opinions that followed me around, was hardly ever dipped into or used at all, but it was always there.

   It was hardly twenty years since that war had ended and so much had changed for my parents during that time and here we were, no longer in Greenwich Village but in beautiful Mill Valley.

   Mount Tamalpais in all its glory attracted many hikers from around the world. Many would arrive by Greyhound on the weekends and head up Throckmorton to climb up any of the wooden steps which ascended towards the mountain. Quite a few of these hikers were German.

   That downtown junction where Miller ran into Throckmorton always was a nice part of town and on the weekends it was busy but not unpleasantly so. Directly opposite the depot on Miller stood Women's Mayers, a sizeable clothing store while the Men's Mayers was about a third of the way down the block near where Sunnyside joined in. Also along this strip was Meyer's Bakery where I used to enjoy a cherry Coke at their soda fountain.

   This was a time when the stores in Mill Valley had a practicality about them. Lockwood's Pharmacy, Strawbridge's cards & stationery, The Redwood Book Store, Ben Franklin five and dime, Esposti's ice cream parlour and many more.

   Sy Weill, a very tall bald man could usually be seen, immaculately attired, standing in front of his store Redhill Liquors smoking and watching the world walk by. His shop was on Throckmorton next door to the diner which had been known as Stuyvesant's but by the early 60s had become Pat & Joe's.

   I used to hang out around the depot, sometimes sitting on the bench with a clear view of the taxi cabs which parked there. One late afternoon while I sat on that bench I saw Ernst Heinemann wearing his full Greyhound uniform with military looking hat talking to this much shorter man who was dressed entirely in Lederhosen complete with a little cap that had a large feather protruding from it. Naturally they were conversing in their native tongue and they made quite a picture standing by the clock tower with the Old Mill Tavern in the background and the sight of pine trees ascending in the distance. It looked like a Nazi officer conversing with a German citizen during the war in some Bavarian village. I sat and watched them chatting away for some time. The fellow in Lederhosen was much older than Ernst and almost certainly would have been active during the great fracas.

   It must have been at least two years later when I read a story in the Chronicle all about our friend Ernst. He'd been arrested and taken off to the psychiatric hospital at Napa.

   There was a Greyhound driver named Bill Burke who was the father of Patty Burke, one of the prettiest girls in my year at school. Bill was a kind of driver's shop steward and he enjoyed the sorts of privileges which come with seniority.

   So Heinemann turned up on Bill Burke's doorstep one evening carrying a copy of William L. Shirer's Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich and telling Bill: "We must get the men together. We're all meeting up on the mountain."

   Presumably Bill humoured him and, once he'd gone, called the police about it.

   The next incident reported in the story was up in the parking lot at Bootjack Camp where the Marin Sheriff's deputy John Goff, who regularly patrolled Stinson and the mountain, confronted Heinemann near his car.

   When the officer became convinced that Ernst should be taken into custody the big German jumped in his vehicle and raced down the mountain. A high speed chase then occurred and the deputy managed to shoot one of Ernst's tires out, after which poor old Heinemann was, indeed, taken into custody and shipped off to Napa.

   It's rather difficult to find a moral to this sad story. I can only guess that the Nazis had more of an impact on poor Ernst's consciousness than he cared to admit and that, just as I had noticed the similarity between a Greyhound uniform and that of a Nazi officer's, something must have snapped in his mind convincing him he was back in the fatherland in 1942.

   By the time of this incident, we hadn't seen Arleigh in quite awhile and I don't think I ever saw him again.

   It's strange to sit outside what is now called the Book Depot amongst all the flamboyant new citizens of our home town and remember what it was like when big Greyhound buses would come through on the hour and take up a fair proportion of the parking lot.

   Mill Valley is so different these days with its cappuccino bars and herbal emporiums. I remember my brother Jim lamenting the fact that there was only one real café left where you could get bacon and eggs with a short stack without any garnish.

   I understand that change is an essential component of life but I can't help missing Pat and Joe's, all the stores which used to light up downtown Mill Valley and the wonderful old bus depot, comic books and all. 

Of Baseball, Comic Books And Records At Village Music

In March of 1957 I was the smallest child in Mrs. Blaugh's fourth grade class at Homestead School and, though I had just turned ten years old, I probably looked about six.

   Being so tiny didn't bother me too much though the unrequited love of my life, Lily Burris, was taller than me and this may have been why she never gave me the time of day.

   The playground at Homestead was a whirl of contrasting activities. During recess, long jump ropes were wielded by pairs of girls while other kids stood in line to skip into it's constant rotation. Whether their skipping was successful or not, they all sang a counting rhyme as the rope came around with the regularity of a metronome.

   Groups of boys with arms around each other would stalk the playground chanting: "We won't stop!" There was hop scotch, marbles and, of course, sports.

   One of my best friends was Alex Robertson who was big for his age, a keen athlete and had a passion for baseball. My other best friends, Glen Pritzker and Billy Bowen were competent enough athletes unlike myself who was not. Because I was so small it was expected that I wouldn't be any good at sports and, sadly, it was a self fulfilling prophecy.

   At home I would play touch football and softball with my brother's friends but never at school. Whenever I would get up to bat at Homestead the cry would go out: "Myers is up!" At this point the outfielders, chuckling amongst themselves, would walk in past the base lines. The humiliation of this would fill me with a rage which guaranteed that I struck out three times in a row.

   The truth was that I had a terror of the ball. Had I used my time at the plate focusing on it and connecting with the bat I might well have knocked it over the fence onto Montford but instead I surrendered to my rage and didn't approach the situation with any clarity.

   My time out in left field was sadly worse as I spent it dreading that the ball might come in my direction and, again, my lack of focus and terror made me a lousy player.

   At home I wasn't too bad. Our father Blackie had got us a pair of fielders' mitts and brother Jim and I would regularly play catch with a hard ball up on Seymour Avenue just above our house.

   So it was mostly other areas of interest which I shared with my friends. Whenever Billy or Alex visited our house they would invariably lose themselves reading my comic books or listening to my records.

   I was, by now, a committed collector. The 45s and LPs were all kept in their original packaging and the comic books were stacked neatly in chronological order on a piece of furniture I had commandeered. I had Uncle Scrooge, Walt Disney's Comics & Stories, Superman and MAD magazines. My one strict rule was that nobody was allowed to fold back the covers on the comics.

   Glen and I would always make our weekly pilgrimage to Village Music where we'd pick up a copy of that week's Top 40 and listen to records in the sound proof booth. In those days the record shop was in one of the shops which nestled within the Sequoia Theater building. 
   Sara Wilcox was possibly the only adult shopkeeper in Mill Valley who didn't treat kids like second class citizens. A wander into Bennetts Variety store always invited the laser like surveillance of whichever bad tempered adult was on duty whereas Sara was always friendly, funny and never tired of playing us whatever records we wanted to hear.

   One record which came out around this time and I purchased was Perry Como's Round And Round. The simplicity of the song's arrangement appealed to me. It began with a quiet rhythm provided by a drummer using brushes. Then Como's voice came in, very gently.

       Find a wheel and it goes round, round, round,

       As it skims along with a happy sound,

       As it goes along the ground, ground, ground,

       'Til it leads you to the one you love,

It proceeded to build with the addition of male singers and soon after with female voices which intertwined through key changes and a middle eight. The whole thing built to a swirling crescendo then returned to the gentle brushes and Como's quiet voice. I loved this record and played it over and over.

   Perry Como recorded on the RCA Victor label which also had Elvis Presley and Harry Belafonte. Glen and I would study the actual labels which, in this case had a full color picture of a dog gazing into the horn of an old gramophone speaker against a black background. We came to know that the names inside the parenthesis under the song's title were those of the composers.

   The pop music of this time was a very broad church and Glen and I followed the fortunes of a wide range of artists. Tab Hunter had gotten to number one with his version of Young Love which was really inferior to Sonny James' recording of the same song but then Tab was a movie star despite being a completely unnatural singer.

   Another movie star who put out a few singles was Tony Perkins. He had a minor hit with Moonlight Swim that same year. The big difference between Perkins and Tab Hunter was that he could actually sing whereas all Tab could do was a passable imitation of singing.

   I guess it was the success of Tab Hunter's single which prompted the other Hollywood studios to put their juvenile leads into the recording studios as, before the year was out, a disk cut by Sal Mineo came into the charts and, presumably, sold quite a few copies. Keep Movin' was its title and it was not very good.  Like Tony Perkins Sal had a good voice but the song was not well crafted and I would never have bought it.

   I had to really love a record to commit the six bits it cost for a single and that was the beauty of someone like Sara Wilcox because Glen and I would only have to ask to hear something like Party Doll by Buddy Knox and she'd play it for us and the sound proof booth meant that she didn't have to listen to it herself.

   I'm not too sure that I even noticed the overstated southern accent of a singer like Buddy Knox whose pronunciations of words like 'fair' (fay-aire) and 'hair' (hay-aire) were very exaggerated but after Elvis Presley broke out of the south and became the phenomenon he was after 1956 it seemed there was a wave of southern white singers in the top 40.

   Another single I had to have was Butterfly by Andy Williams as well as a peculiar one that I always felt uncertain about which was Teenage Crush by Tommy Sands. I could never make up my mind if it was good or not but I did buy it though I never purchased another Tommy Sands single.

   This was also the time that Fats Domino released the terrific I'm Walkin' and The Diamonds came out with one I loved which was Little Darlin'. The singing voices on this record were so eccentric that they wouldn't have been out of place in a Warner Brothers cartoon. The opening created a visual picture of a waterfall in my mind with castanets clapping like clams as they fell.

   I was, by this time, absolutely enthralled with every record made by Elvis Presley for this was at the beginning of his long career and he was still putting out terrific singles like the next one to come along which was All Shook Up. This absolutely fabulous disk reminded me of Don't Be Cruel which was not such a mystery as, like its predecessor, it was composed by Otis Blackwell.

   I knew nothing of the behind the scenes machinations that Elvis's manager pulled off but the wily old Colonel  Parker formed a publishing company and demanded that song writers like Blackwell sign over the rights to this firm which was the main reason why Elvis had a writing credit on it. Elvis, however, was a demanding perfectionist in the studio and almost certainly made some changes to the lyrics during the thirty or so takes that he did.

   There were always words I couldn't fully fathom on an Elvis recording and All Shook Up was no exception. The line: "My friends say I'm acting as wild as a bug" filtered through to my ears as: "My friends say Mack you're acting queer as a bug."

   The opening beguiled me immediately with its fluid boogie woogie rhythm. The individual notes seemed to melt into each other unlike the bass notes on Don't Be Cruel which were distinct and separate.

   Another disk released on RCA Victor was by Harry Belafonte who was one of my favorites. Banana Boat was a much played 45 in my collection and his next release was Mama Look At Boo Boo which introduced us to dialects and accents we'd never encountered before. His West Indian lingo and lyrics were enchanting to a ten year old.

  

“Mama, look at boo boo,” they shout,

Their mother tell them, “Shut up your mouth,”

“That is your daddy,"

"Oh, no! My daddy can't be ugly so,”

"Shut your mouth! Go away!

Mama look at Boo Boo they."

   1957 was turning out to be rich for popular music as each week brought new delights to Sara's sound proof booth. I already had a few singles by Chuck Berry on the Chess and, unlike Elvis, his diction was crystal clear. His latest release was School Days and the witty lyrics described the drudgery of the classroom giving way to the joys of dancing to rock and roll after school.

   Another singer I had no problem understanding was Pat Boone. His next record which entered my collection was Love Letters In The Sand, which was basically a sad song but there was nothing melancholy about his version.

   Glen and I regularly discussed what we were going to do when we grew up. I was going to be a singer and he would be my manager. I did have a good singing voice and could produce fair imitations of all the records which I listened to. I remember standing on a bench in the playground at Homestead singing Love Letters In The Sand to an audience of probably nobody.

   Unlike me, Glen was a straight A student and by the end of 4th grade he skipped a year, going to Alto then Edna Maguire and ultimately to a prep school in the city so I didn't see him again for many years.  On the advice of his little league coach Glen gave up baseball and took up tennis, becoming something of a star player along with his sister Robin. But I knew nothing of this.

   As for Alex Robertson he was the main reason that I was able to be a loud mouthed little guy for he stepped in on many occasions to protect me from whatever rough justice my big mouth would inspire.

   Billy Bowen I spied leaving Village Music in the early 1960s with entire albums of Chuck Berry under his arm. When I asked why he told me he used them to practice his drums to at home.

   We all went to Alto for sixth grade and for reasons I no longer recall I drifted away from Alex and Billy. New friendships developed and the Top 40 evolved into something less excitng than the early Elvis and Little Richard. Such was the way of things but those years at Homestead retain a special fascination for me.