Death of Whitey Ford creates realization that sharp edges of memory become worn

 Ironically, the passing of iconic NY Yankee pitcher Whitey Ford brings into focus how memories blur when stored in the recesses of an old mind. My old mind, to be specific, now that I'm 72.

For years, perhaps for decades, I hadn't thought about watching from centre field upper deck as the Detroit Tigers played the Yankees. Ford on the mound. Elston Howard behind the plate. Mantle and Maris in the outfield below us. 

Pitching for the Tigers? Maybe Jim Bunning, Frank Larry or Don Mossi, but I can't recall.

The Tiger outfield had Kaline on our left, Rocky Colavito in front of us and Charlie Maxwell on our right. Eddy Yost on third, Chico Fernandez on short, and on second, with Harvey Kuenn gone to Cleveland, I don't remember. Maybe Jake Wood. It seems to me the Tigers had replaced Steve Bilko with Norm Cash on first by then.

The four of us chose the row of seats as high as they went, sitting there in the bleachers, our backs to the upper deck stadium wall, with a view of everything, including Whitey Ford. I was a high-school student at Patterson Collegiate Institute, (Goyeau and Elliott), but this would have happened on summer holidays. I lived at 1115 Bruce. I think the others included Gary, who lived on Grove a couple of doors from Clarke's Market. Randy lived on Victoria a block north of our school. The other was likely Doug who lived on Dougall near Hanna. We'd walk up Pelissier from Giles to Wyandotte, perhaps cutting through Woolworths, which had a back entrance on Pelissier and main doors on Ouellette. The entrance to the tunnel bus depot was off an alley next to the Radio Tavern.

Those route details I am sure of.

The bus cost something like a quarter each way. You bought your tickets at a booth before going out to the platform to wait for the next bus. They ran every 10 or 15 minutes, so it was never a long wait. I can't remember what identification we needed to pass single file from the bus, through US Immigration and Customs turnstiles, and back onto the bus. It might be that we had our birth certificates, but I think I recall our student card would do. We wouldn't have had drivers licences because we weren't old enough yet. "Where are you going?" "Tiger game." "Go ahead." I don't recall anyone ever being turned back, held up or spoken to with terse words whenever we went to Detroit. I once went after school to go over the Hudson's to buy a t-shirt with wide horizontal stripes like the Beach Boys had worn on TV and I still got home in time for supper. Hudson's had run out of those shirts so I probably didn't bother mentioning to my parents that I had gone over the border after school. Going to Detroit was not that unusual for us downtown kids in those days.

The tunnel bus took us all the way to the confluence of the many main streets that burst out into the city in all directions, including Woodward near Hudson's. Our landmark for the street to the ballpark was the United Shirt store next to the huge wood carving of men drinking at a bar. The carving was a facade around a door to a bar. On a hot day, the stench of booze, smoke and sweat from that bar hit us as we hurried past and wondered why anyone would want to go into a place that smelled like that. We walked up that street to the stadium. Was it still Briggs Stadium or had the name changed yet to Tiger Stadium?

I think it was 50 cents to sit in the bleachers. The vendor with the tray of beers in paper cups would not sell to teenagers. We asked a lone man if he would buy us beers. A cup of beer was 10 cents. The rule was a person could only buy eight at a time. We gave the guy 80 cents. He kept four, we each had our first beer, sitting in the hot sun high in the centre field bleachers watching some of the all-time greats of major league baseball.

That's the story I have told through the years. Now I wonder, did I first hear parts of it from someone else? Did I abscond with the story about the beers, imagined that we had done that, and created a false memory? It's now impossible to know. It would be so vivid because I had gone to Tiger games with friends, taken the tunnel bus lots of times, walked there, sat in the bleachers.

Today, reading that Whitey Ford had died at age 91, my legendary first-beer story came back to me. But it has come back in fragments. As the sports world marks the passing of a baseball great, I find myself mourning the loss of detail and clarity from one of the great memories of my youth.

Experiences and stories have a way of mingling. Like the suites all in order in a fresh deck of playing cards, they get shuffled together and dealt. These fingers, wrinkled and shaky, pick up a fresh hand and wonder.  

Remembering Leon Russell

Leon Russell died last week at 74. I had no idea he was hardly five years older than me.

I thought he was a lot older. It wasn’t just the white beard. That beard and his long hood of stringy hair were already going grey when I saw him heading The Shelter People at the best concert I have ever seen: Detroit’s Cobo Hall, 1973.

Hell, he was just in his early 30s. I was 25. Leon seemed like an older statesman of rock and roll. Apparently, there was a reason I thought that way. Leon was like a new car with high mileage, as if he had been across country a few times before that new-car smell had dissipated.

Leon was a teenager when he left Oklahoma for Los Angeles in the early 60s. Already he could conjure magic from a piano. Rock and roll was still young but about to explode as The Beatles landed in America. All through the 60s we heard Leon play, but never knew his name. Leon, the studio musician was paid by the session, playing on hits by The Beach Boys, Sonny & Cher, Johnny Rivers, Gary Lewis and the Playboys, the Mommas and the Poppas, The Monkees and many others. This Christmas, when you hear Darlene Love singing Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) from the Phil Spector wall of sound A Christmas Gift to You album, that’s Leon’s piano charging up through the middle of the finale chorus.

In 1964, Dick Clark, the Saturday TV dance program host, brought rock and roll to prime time with the T.A.M.I. Show. On the show, Jan and Dean, Marvin Gaye and Leslie Gore needed accompaniment from a house band. Clark hired young Leon to lead the house band. That, by the way, was where Mick Jagger first saw James Brown perform, dancing while he sang. The Stones’ singer never just stood in front of a microphone again.

It seemed to me that by the early 1970s, Leon was at the centre of rock and roll history.

After playing the Woodstock Festival in 1969, Joe Cocker and his band toured Europe. At the end of the tour, Cocker’s band, save for Chris Stainton, had become strung out and disbursed to places unknown. Cocker met with his manager in New York and said his band was gone and he needed a long rest. The manager said you open your North American tour in two weeks. Another musician in the manager’s office told a bewildered Cocker, “better call Leon Russell.” Two weeks later in Detroit, the Mad Dogs and Englishmen Tour began.

Keyboardist Bobby Whitlock, bassist Carl Radle and drummer Jim Gordon were in that band. They stuck together after the Mad Dogs tour and with Leon backed the husband and wife duo, Delany and Bonnie, who attracted a range of great musicians including Eric Clapton, Dave Mason and Duane Allman. That’s when Clapton, Allman, Radle, Whitlock and Gordon formed Derek and the Dominos.

About that time, Leon’s pounding piano backed The Stones on the song, Live with Me, on the Let It Bleed album. Horn players Bobby Keys and Jim Horn, transitioned from Mad Dogs and Englishmen, to Delaney & Bonnie to finding permanent gigs with The Rolling Stones.

When Elton John first came to North America in 1970, I remember reading in Rolling Stone, John telling the magazine how amazed and nervous he was when he came on stage and recognized Leon Russell in the front row there to see him.

Leon had recorded an album under the group name, Asylum Choir, with one of the most original anti-war songs, Down on the Base. That album showed Leon that his voice too would work on recordings. Leon’s ability to write arresting and original lyrics would be heard later on many songs, including Roll Away the Stone on his first album under his own name, and Alcatraz and Stranger in a Strange Land on his Leon Russell and the Shelter People album. His song Hummingbird has been covered by many artists, including George Benson, who made it a hit single.

Artists who played on Leon’s first solo album include Harrison and Starr, Clapton and Stevie Winwood, Watts and Wyman from The Stones, and many others. On I Put a Spell on You, you can hear Harrison and Clapton talking as they miss the beat in the opening bars and need to start over.

My friend John Bortolin saw Leon and a small band in a concert in Detroit some months before the Mad Dogs and Englishman event. John told me about seeing this concert, and that the man promised Bob Dylan would be coming back again.

Leon’s piano is heard on Bob Dylan’s Watching the River Flow, recorded early in 1971 and produced by Leon. Bob Dylan’s voice had been damaged in the motorcycle accident after the release of Blonde on Blonde, and he had not recorded nor performed for more than a year since that accident. Leon and George Harrison encouraged Dylan to perform four songs at the Concert for Bangladesh that Harrison had organized at Madison Square Garden in August that year. With Dylan, George played guitar, Ringo played tambourine and Leon played bass.

Joan and I saw the Shelter People tour hit Cobo Hall with one amazing song after another – the same horn section that later became staples with The Rolling Stones, the rhythm section played on John Lennon albums.

The chronology in my memory may be mixed, but the images and sounds in my mind are clear. I have tried to keep up with the Leon saga through Rolling Stone magazine and other media. The movie, The Wrecking Crew, available in the USA on Netflix, chronicles the studio musicians in the 1960s who performed on so many recordings. Some, like Herb Albert, Glenn Campbell and Leon, went on to become widely known. Most stayed in obscurity while groups like The Association tried to replicate their records on stage, but failed horribly.

The last time we saw Leon it was at an outdoor amphitheatre called Meadowbrook at a university campus in north Detroit. We brought our sons, who were still in late elementary or early high school. They weren’t impressed enough to want to sit on a blanket and listen to the music. I insisted. I thought someday they’d be happy to remember and say, “I saw Leon Russell live.”

Whatever Happened to Michelle Bell?

(Although I stopped posting to this blog every Sunday in order to concentrate on writing fiction, apparently I cannot stop myself from posting from time to time.)

I’ve told this to lots of people over the past four decades, so I should include it in my blog too.

A woman I worked with named Martha Bell told me in 1972 that she was Paul McCartney’s mother’s sister. Her daughter Michelle Bell was about 8 years old. They lived in Essex County somewhere near Maidstone, Ontario.

That would make Martha Paul McCartney’s aunt and her daughter, Michelle, Paul McCartney’s cousin.

I was especially sceptical. Actually, I did not believe her, until the next week when she brought a few black and white Brownie snapshots to work that showed her and her older children with Paul, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. They were all relaxing around a living room with her family.

There was no doubt. It was the three Beatles circa 1964 in those little square photographs with the perforated edges.

Now you think I am making this up. But I am not. In the words of my good friend Jennifer: “I swear to God!”

Let me set the scene. This happened at the office of The Essex Times, a weekly tabloid newspaper owned and operated by a man named Woody Nicholson. The office was on the north side of Talbot Road right next to the railway tracks. It’s not there anymore. It blew up in 1980. I was living near Ottawa by then.

http://www3.gendisasters.com/ontario/13619/essex-on-gas-explosion-feb-1980

My job for The Essex Times was to cover and write local news; take, develop and print photographs; write heads and layout the pages; shoot the line shots on the graphics camera; size and shoot my photographs to make half tones; take the stripped line shots to the printer; and deliver the printed tabloids to local stores. The venerable Evelyn Walker was the editor. A high school kid and a young woman who typed my stories into a typesetting machine were the rest of the staff.

Martha was the classifieds person working with Woody on the ads. Michelle came into the office with her mom from time to time. After seeing the photos, I remember thinking, “Michelle Bell, those are words that go together well.”

“Martha my dear, don’t forget me,” popped into my head too.

Martha said that the photos were taken when the three Beatles stopped to see her when they first played in Toronto. Michelle was a baby. I recall one of the pictures showed one of the Beatles holding baby Michelle. Martha’s other kids were teenagers. Where in Toronto I do not know, but I had the impression it was an attached home in the older part of the city.

Michelle would be about 50 years old now. I wonder sometimes what happened to her and whether she ever connected with her cousin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifobQSP-b7E

Hairy Days of My Youth

This is the 24^th post of memories from years long past. I posted a story each Sunday and they’ve had more than 500 views. At this point, I’m setting the memory-blog writing aside to concentrate on writing fiction. However, I have not run out of ideas, so I’ll be firing out more memories again sometime.

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Bill Hicks gave me white walls for the first time when I was in Grade 8.

He rubbed hot lather around my ears, sharpened his straight razor on a long leather strap, then shaved the smooth ring from my sideburns up over my ears. That was a milestone.

My boss at the little neighbourhood store where I worked in high school called it, “getting your ears lowered.”

He and I both went to Bill Hicks, whose barber shop was in that red brick cluster of stores on the north side of Erie Street West at Victoria Ave.

Until around Grade 10, for me a haircut was a haircut was a haircut. There were just two choices: sticking up in a brush cut like my Dad had, or slicked down with a part. The latter was easier. The brush cut would mean keeping a flat platform on top of my head, which meant keeping it full of Brylcreem and carrying a comb.

A lot of guys had what we called a rat-tail comb so the point stuck out of their back pocket like a dangerous weapon. I tried it. It caught on the couch cushion and stuck out when I rode my bike. It looked cool but it was a nuisance.

It was sometime in Grade 10, I’d be about 15. John Bradac and Joe Rispoli, who lived on Dougall in our neighbourhood, were the first to have long hair. Not just early-Beatles long, their hair was Rolling Stones long, right down to their necks. I told Bill Hicks, “I’d like to leave it longer on the sides.” Bill told me he knew how I should have my hair and gave me the same old short on the sides with white walls. I never went back.

By Grade 11, I had a big wave in front that went up on the sides and down over my forehead in the middle. Extra Brylcreem held it in place.

By college, my hair was longer. I cut it myself, shaped like Prince Valiant’s. This was a period when I had a pair of bright red corduroy bell bottom hip hugger pants which I wore with a multicolored shirt with a South Asian style pattern. I also had an orange shirt with bell shaped sleeves. 

Remembering this helps me when I see young people today with tattoos on their neck. I too was reckless in my youth.

After college, I went to what was called a unisex hair salon, so it was long but not too long. These were the days when I had a tweed and a salmon leisure suit, and a bright yellow suit, which had extra wide lapels and pant legs and two-inch cuffs. I wore the bright yellow suit when I photographed weddings. I wore it with a silk black shirt that had bright green vines sprouting blossoms of every bright colour. Around my neck was a choker of red wood beads held by a black shoelace.

Still in my 20s and working as a reporter, Joan and I went to see my friend John Bortolin who was living in Vancouver. John took me to a hairdresser who put a perm-wave in my hair. This looked good for a couple of months. Back in Chatham I went to a hairdresser near the office of The Windsor Star bureau to get the wave put back. It came out like an Afro. So, I had an Afro for a couple of months until it flopped and I looked like I was a close relation of Bozo the Clown. I got it cut off short then kept it just long enough to cover part of my ears.

When I was working at Queen’s Park in my late 30s, a woman, who had a spider drawn on her cheek, gave me a spiked style. It wasn’t ultra punk, just sort of like a high brush cut, but instead of flat top, it was a set of random pointed clusters. I liked it for a while, but that was the end of the experiments. With kids, a career and a variety of other interests, a haircut was a haircut was a haircut.

When the North is on Fire

Being Public Communications Officer for forest fire emergency operations in Northern Ontario was my favourite job of all time.

In 1978, I’d only been with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources for a few months when I got my first fire experience. They sent me to the Regional Fire Centre in Dryden. People there soon learned that was a mistake. I was clueless. Any former reporter from southern Ontario with no knowledge about the North would be. Lucky for me, the Regional Director was Ray Fortner, the former District Manager in Chatham. He knew me from my reporter days where I had met him and had written about Rondeau Park and about Conservation Officers patrolling for fish poachers on the Thames River. So, he turned my few days in Dryden into an orientation. He even took me in a scout plane to view the huge fire from the air.

A fire that is a couple of miles wide and perhaps ten miles long will push streams of hot air miles into the sky. A small plane will hit an updraft and be carried skyward, then plummet when it flies into the cooler downdraft. I tossed my cookies, using my jacket for a barf bag.

A couple of years later, near the end of May of 1980, I was at a meeting with naturalists in Murphy’s Point Provincial Park at Big Rideau Lake. It was about a two-hour drive from both my office in Kemptville and my home in Nepean. I was told to leave the government car I was using at the airport in Ottawa where a ticket was waiting. I was to go straight to the Ontario Fire Centre (OFC) in Sault Ste. Marie. If I missed the flight, the back-up was early the next morning.

I thought to myself that I needed to pack and to tell Joan that I would be away, and there were people I needed to inform from my office, so I chose to go to the office and take the morning flight. When my boss, Roy Taylor, saw me in the hallway, he called me into his office. “You missed a flight to go on fire duty,” he said. “If you ever miss another, you will never get chance to miss a third.”

I’d never seen Mr. Taylor so serious.

The fire flap that spring was huge with 100 fires not under control across the North. At the OFC, my job was to collect the fire reports sent by teletype from the regional centres and write a daily round-up of the fire situation province-wide. My report was checked by the provincial fire boss then sent to news services. Teletype – basically typing through phone lines -- was the most efficient way to send information at the time. Compared to today’s electronic communications, teletype was slow and limited.

My news experience, that orientation up in Dryden, plus my stint at OFC, made me the candidate for communications officer for the provincial fire team. During two weeks in winter, I went to the OMNR professional development centre in Dorset, near Algonquin Park, to attend fire management training. Foresters, biologists, resource technicians and others from offices across the province were handpicked for the team: fire boss, personnel manager, supplies manager, aircraft manager, and others. The public communications manager (me) reported to and got information from the maps and records officer. I learned not to bother anyone else. Fighting fire was like a military operation.

In 1982, twice I got a call for fire and went straight to the Ottawa airport. I knew somebody else would tell Joan. I knew I could get toiletries and extra clothes from the supply manager in Red Lake when I got there. I flew to Toronto, changed plans to a Nordair flight that landed in Sault Ste. Marie and Thunder Bay before I got off in Dryden. In Dryden, I got on a plane that held less than a dozen people that put down in Kenora and Sioux Lookout before landing in Red Lake. At Red Lake, a truck took me to the district fire centre where the team I had met during the winter in Dorset were doing their jobs – tracking aircraft, marking jump fires on a wall-size topographic map, ordering equipment, planning personnel allocations -- it was intense and just like a military operation.

I went right to work, collecting statistics – size and location of the fire, type of fuel (forest type), threat to habitation, threat to private property, weather conditions and forecast, number of fire crews* on the ground, number of water bombers and helicopters. My job was to write public dispatches and to speak to any media who called. I was at the fire centre for two weeks from before 6 a.m. to after 10 p.m. daily and loved every minute.

The fire was threatening a Native community. My daily dispatch said an evacuation plan was set to go. I got a call from CBC in Toronto, they were sending a reporter and videographer to cover the fire. The reporter told me they would be renting a helicopter to get aerial shots.

“No you won’t,” I said. “Our first priority is to protect lives. We have air traffic control of the region. Besides, there are no helicopters available because we are using them all. Come and get your footage and information, buy I will take you in a helicopter, make sure you get the best footage of the fire that can be taken safely, and also arrange for us to land at the base camp where you can interview the firefighters.”

They arrived and it went as planned. They got great footage and we got the coverage we needed to inform the province about our efforts.

The camp was set up in a location that had already burned. It was the most surreal thing I have ever seen. Imagine a sunny day after a snow storm in a forest where everything is blanketed in white snow. Now, change that white snow to black ash. The stumps and skeletons of trees were black. When a forest fire consumes all the oxygen in a location, some trees actually bake from the heat but do not catch fire. So, small clusters of unburned evergreens were completely black. The rocks faces and the earth were black. The only things not black were the lake and the sky, and brown tents, firefighters in orange jumpsuits, and the yellow float planes.

Toward the end of my years with OMNR, I was Communications Planner and Projects Manager for Forest Resources Group at Queen’s Park. By then, the forest fire management centre in Sault Ste. Marie had hired a full-time communications person. That ended fire duty for me, but I was always glad to have had to the opportunity to be part of the team.

*A fire crew is five people armed with chain saws, axes, hose, a pump and a radio. Never six, never four. If the fire changes and they have to get out of their positions, a helicopter will land in a clearing or shore. There is no time to ask how many people are getting on. The pilot counts one, two, three, four, five guys and takes off. Each crew has a leader. Every five crews has a group leader. Every five groups … and so on.

I was never on a crew -- battling in the heat, the smoke, the ash, the mud, the rugged terrain and their own exhaustion. They fought the fire, I told the story. They had their job. I had mine.

Penny Candy at the End of an Era

When we were kids, we had corner stores that sold penny candy.

People who have only known 7-11s and Mac’s Milk stores can hardly imagine what our corner grocery stores were like.

Every neighbourhood in the old inner city of Windsor had a store. When I lived at 1115 Bruce Ave., I could walk 20 minutes north to Wyandotte or the same distance south to Tecumseh Road, and never be more than two or three blocks from a little store. People called them “corner stores,” although they weren’t always on a corner. Prier’s Market, at Erie and Church, and an IGA on Bruce by St. Clare School, were actually built to be stores. Most were just the converted living room of a basic house, but they all had penny candy.

Today they are all back to being just houses again.

I worked Grades 9, 10 and 11 at Clark’s Market, which was the front room of a little house on Grove between Dougall and Church. A few times every day, a couple of little kids would come in all by themselves. Some would hardly be tall enough to reach up and put their few pennies on the counter. Perhaps they had found three or four pop bottles, which they could turn in for the deposit: 2¢ each for 10 oz. bottles, 5¢ for a large bottle. Either I or Mr. Clark would open a small paper bag and the ritual would begin.

The kids would point at their choices through the glass side of a cabinet with four or five shelves. On the shelves were open boxes of various candy. As I put each selection in the bag I would tell the kids what it cost and how much money they had left. It would go like this: Black balls (3 for a penny), four green leaves (gumdrops, 2 for a penny), jube jubes (3 for a penny), a licorice (2¢), a caramel (1¢), a straw of powdered sugar(1¢), a necklace of hard candies on a string (3¢) and so on until all the pennies were spent. And out they would go with their bag of treasure.

Older kids would come in for a pop (10¢) or a pop to “drink in” so they didn’t pay the deposit. They could have a red licorice with their pop as they sat drinking it on the ice cream freezer. The chrome freezer had thick rubberized lids on top. It was sturdy and it was where I’d sit when we weren’t busy.

In the freezer were cylinders of ice cream wrapped in paper. We had vanilla, chocolate or strawberry. I would make an ice cream cone by pealing the paper off and pressing the cylinder of ice cream into a cone (6¢). Also, we had Popsicles (cherry, banana, grape, orange, chocolate, maybe pineapple) and Icycles, which were flavoured ice, like Popsicles in a plastic tube (all 5¢), plus two sizes of bricks of ice cream.

The pop cooler by the window beside the front door was a rectangular tub about as high as desk. It was painted with a brand, Coca Cola probably. The whole top of pop cooler was a chrome centre-hinged lid so you would open one side or the other to look down to see what kind of pop it held. The bottles stood half submerged in water that kept them cold. A towel sat on the lid so kids could wipe their wet bottles. We had Coke, Pepsi, Double Cola, Hires Root Beer, Orange Crush, 7 Up, Vernors, Grape, Cream Soda, Lemon Lime – what am I forgetting? All 8¢ plus 2¢ deposit.

Often kids who had been playing a game like scrub at Mitchell Park would go to Clark’s, just a block from the park, and hang out on the steps with their cold pop, then come in to trade the bottle deposit for a licorice or some gum. Double Bubble and Buzooka Joe both had comics under the wrapper.

Part of my job was to keep the pop cooler filled and to take the empties to the basement. In the basement, I would sort the bottles in their wooden crates that held four sets of six bottles.

George Clark and his sister, Mrs. Thompson, lived in the back. They worked very hard to get by. Clark’s had a butcher’s meat cooler with a glass front. He sold steaks, pork chops, stewing beef and hamburger, which he would grind fresh when the customer asked. What I am saying, it wasn’t hamburger yet when a customer said “a pound and a half of hamburger.” Mr. Clark would put on his apron, weigh the chunks of beef, then grind it and weigh it again, wrap it in red paper and write the price with a grease pencil.

The market sold cigarettes by the pack (32¢) or by the carton. Players, Export, Chesterfield and Palm Mall were not filtered, Cameo and DuMaurier were. Clark’s sold nickel and dime chocolate bars – Crispy Crunch, Coffee Crisp, O Henry, Aero, Cadbury. Clark’s carried a few fresh vegetables and they had canned goods, detergents, cooking oil… not a lot of choice but if you needed it, they had it. And for some regulars, they kept a book of credit, which the customers paid on payday.

People with credit would run in for a few items, it would be recorded and they would pay at the end of the week. Once, Mr. Clark saw some people who lived nearby arrive home with a trunk full of groceries. They hadn’t paid their bill to Mr. Clark yet, so he phoned them to say they should pay him. He sent me down to their house to collect.

Until the early 60s, the big grocery stores were on the main street downtown. People walked to these stores – Dominion, A&P, Loblaw’s -- and carried armfuls of groceries home two or three times a week. In those days, most mothers did not have jobs outside the home. Then suburban plazas opened with larger grocery stores with lots of parking so people could drive to get their groceries once a week. The current Value Village at Dorwin Plaza was the site of the first of these drive-to grocery stores that I saw. When we moved to South Windsor in 1965, we had four large stores a few minutes by car to buy our groceries.

I worked 4 to 6 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays and 10 to 6 p.m. on Saturdays. I kept shelves stocked. I delivered groceries to homes when someone phoned in an order or were not able to carry it all. I waited on the kids sometimes. I went to the wholesaler on Janette near Caron first thing Saturday morning to stock up on cigarettes and a few other items that would fit in my big carrier on the front of my bike.

After Mr. Clark had sawed some perfect y-bone steaks off a hind quarter of beef, he was tired. He’d hang up his apron and say, “I can’t sing and I can’t dance.”

Working at Clark’s Market was always interesting. Potatoes were murphys or spuds. Eggs were cackle berries. Every customer was important, whether a family buying steaks or a child buying a licorice with a dirty pop bottle. At 6 p.m. every Saturday, when all the empties were sorted in the basement, the store was swept and the counter was wiped clean, Mr. Clark gave me a $5 bill.

Rest in peace, Mr. Clark and Mrs. Thompson. Thanks for showing me the honour of a good day’s work. Now I’m the age that you were then, and guess what. I can’t sing and I can’t dance.

Going on the Record about Music

Once in a while somebody makes a remark along the lines of -- imagine the young Bob Dylan trying out for one of those singer competition shows on TV. He’d be gone in a minute – this guy who has generated an album every year for 50 years. Same for Mick Jagger, Diana Ross, James Brown, Chris Montez, Domingo Samudio – the Sam of Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. (Woolly Bully was the top selling song of 1965.)

That always gets me thinking about my love for music and the music I especially love.

In 1964, Mom handed me a glossy insert from the Reader’s Digest. Opened up, it became one big poster with pictures of record albums. It said they would send me six for free if I joined the Columbia Record Club.

It was pretty enticing, because finding and buying the music you wanted wasn’t easy back then.

There were no music stores. Records were sold in a back corner of the same stores that sold Davy Crocket underwear, Royal Family t-towels, Flash Gordon pyjamas, moosehead knickknacks, cartoon-cat wall clocks, cone bras and hair spray for beehive hairdos. Those five and dime stores – S. S. Kresge, Woolworth and Metropolitan – also had long counters with stools where men could eat a hot breakfast or lunch while making crude remarks to the waitress. Music wasn’t the specialty at those stores.

At least two other record clubs were similar, but I went with the Columbia Club because it had The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night and all three of Bob Dylan’s albums. The deal was: you selected six records to buy, then picked six more that they would send to you free. You only had to buy six more over the next year.

Six records at about $3.50 each plus shipping was about $25. I only made $5 a week at my after-school job. It was a hard decision but I went for it.

Bobby Vinton’s Blue Velvet, a Jan and Dean and The New Christy Minstrels were part of my free choices. Not my style, but they were free, so what the hay. A Peter Paul and Mary album that had Blowin’ in the Wind on it turned out to be a great choice. And, of course, I got the first three Dylan albums and A Hard Day’s Night.

Things turned sour from there. The club only offered albums from the Columbia record label. Columbia did not produce other Beatle albums, just that one movie track. So, no more Beatles choices. And the price of the monthly album was higher than the price in stores. Worse yet, Columbia was an established label with older artists and hadn’t signed many rock and rollers. Columbia would send an album that I didn’t want with a big poster full of more lame choices. If I didn’t want that month’s album, I had to figure out how to send it back quickly at my cost. If I missed the deadline, I had to buy the album. I think that’s how I got stuck with Andy Williams’ Days of Wine and Roses.

Every month, some junky album would come in the mail and I would have to pay to send it back. I also had to buy something until I made the six-more quota. Another Side of Bob Dylan came out later that year. I grabbed that one. I think I got the Tim Rose album with Morning Dew because the year was up and I had to buy something. Luckily, that turned out to be a good one.

Here in my old age, music is everywhere. My computer came with at least two ways to listen to music, not counting hundreds of iTunes stations. In the USA they also have Pandora. My car has satellite radio with over a hundred stations. People have music in their phones. My iPod has 5,000 songs, which I can just shuffle without choosing.

I know there are popular artists these days. The skinny blond on talk shows who just moved from Nashville to New York, Taylor Swift. A lot of people with made up names like Drake and 50 Cent. Maroon 5 or 6. The Perry woman who did half-time at the last superbowl. So, maybe some young people today have a special bond with their favourite music. I don’t know. Music seems so transitory today, the downloading and freeloading, but where is it, where’s the music? In the anti-tactile cloud.

I sound like my parents’ generation. “I can’t understand the words in that rock and roll music,” they’d say. I guess old is old, but then again, maybe old is as old does.

One thing for sure, my music is part of who I am. It’s me as much as my accent or the way I walk or my big rosy nose.

Over the years I have lent and lost some of my records, and my brothers have some of the records that we played in our basement in the 60s, but I still have three milk crates of old albums and about a dozen 45s.

My records are a reflection of me. I like being able to look at them, read their liner notes; it’s like looking in a retro-mirror at myself. I’ve got a couple of Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks; Thunderclap Newman; the David Bromberg with the King Kong cover; three Siegal Schwall Blues Band; High Tide and Green Grass and Let Your Ya-Yas Out; Time Has Come by the Chambers Brothers; Tauhid by Pharoah Sanders; Mothermania; Asylum Choir; Doug Sahm and Band; a couple of Aretha albums; collections of obscure blues; The Kinks’ Soap Opera; Grant Smith and the Power; a John Mayall reunion with some great songs with Eric and Sugarcane Harris; plus sundry other reflections of my eclectic taste.

Of course, I have most of the mandatory records appropriate to my age. All the Beatles. The Stones from Beggar’s Banquet through Goat’s Head Soup; Frampton Comes Alive. All Dylan’s up to the motorcycle accident plus a bunch after the come back. Bob Seger’s first live album plus Night Moves. Hendrix first. Traffic’s first. Velvet Underground’s too. Live at Leeds. Big Brother and the Holding Company. Tapestry. The list, if not the beat, goes on.