This was my favorite TV show as a kid. I also loved The Liberace Show.
There were lots of shows on where you'd get to watch people dancing. The music was great too. Late at night, there was only a test pattern on.
These were my heroes as a pre-teen. I kept scrapbooks of clippings about them. I met Alan Shepard as an adult (during his book tour) and he signed my old LIFE magazine with him on the cover.
I witnessed these events on live TV. What an emotional roller-coaster!
This guy on the right held me in his arms onstage. Toddlers are hard to resist. About 12 years later we met him again, and when my mother asked if he remembered it, he nicely lied and said that he did. I got to see the guy below, on the left, when he looked like the picture on the right.
My first concert that was unaccompanied by parents was this one. I went with my older girl cousin. I don't think she was into the British Invasion, she preferred Elvis and Frankie Avalon.
I got to see these rock icons in concert. I most regret not seeing Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, or The Beatles.
The 17-yr-old version of me had this closeup view of Plant. More about that here.
I lived in a whole bunch of places, some of them twice. Trying to settle down a bit more these days.
Yes, it's another birthday. Nothing planned except maybe a day off work. I will most likely be well-behaved and probably go to bed early.
Here is Liberace playing "Bumble Boogie" on his TV show.
My mother always told me that she quit smoking while she was pregnant with me. I was going through some photos in a trunk, and found some very strong evidence to the contrary!
In most of the adult photos of my mother, she is holding a cigarette. Not sure what made her start, just the usual reasons probably - trying to fit in with the other 'kids' or wanting to rebel. It wasn't really known to be dangerous when she started, probably in the 1930s or 1940s, but by the 1950s (this is taken in 1953) people were becoming aware of some of the hazards.
The others in the photo are her parents, who were visiting her in Phoenix from southern Illinois, so she is openly showing rebellion in doing it. She would tell me some stories about her father, who was a strict Southern Baptist and on many occasions unleashed fiery righteous indignation and abuse upon those within his dominion, especially the females. She told about the time, and this was as an adult after she had moved out, where she spent a very long day working in their house... sanding, wallpapering, scrubbing and painting... and when she was finished she took out a cigarette and lit it. Her dad grabbed her arm, twisted it around to her back (nearly breaking it), put his foot on her behind and shoved her out the front door. He told her that she would never light another cigarette under his roof.
She didn't quit though. She smoked for the rest of her life right up until she was in her early 70s and had been bedridden with emphysema for some time - she had the oxygen tank with her, and was pretty addled from morphine (and just lack of oxygen in the brain) so that she somehow thought it was OK to continue smoking. She started a fire in her apartment (and luckily her home nurse was there to take action) but ended up being burned in the face and all the way into her poor old already-shredded lungs. She didn't die from that, but, boy was she angry. Her burned lungs wouldn't let her smoke anymore. She had been calling smoking "her only pleasure" for years. She lived for maybe another year, and we lost her just 2 weeks apart from MrB's father who had lung cancer. They were both almost militant smokers... take the cigarettes out of my cold dead hands... that sort of attitude. (I've told some of this tale before a few years back.)
I don't think the pregnant smoking stunted my growth or anything. I was a big 9 lb. baby. As a toddler I was playing with the butts in an ashtray, and she made me eat a bite of the ashes. It worked. I never, ever, wanted to smoke a cigarette in my life, so as bizarre as it sounds, she did me a favor. Don't know if all those long car trips with both parents filling the car with smoke hurt me either. Something with surely get me someday, but I don't think it will be nicotine.
As a military kid, we were constantly moving when I was growing up, and my parents also moved many additional times that were not required by the service. It was a crazy lifestyle for a kid, and I am still trying to construct my own history. It’s very difficult to do, as I do not have anyone to ask anymore (father gone 1967, mother gone 1993, no siblings). I might run across an old, hoarded and sometimes inherited piece of paper – a letter, postcard, receipt – and from that I find an address or date to help complete the puzzle. Sometimes, all I have are memories, which was the case here. I had no address, and all the landmarks had been destroyed.
Daddy was transferred to the North Pole, on the DEW Line to keep an eye out for the Russians during the Cold War (and in his case the "cold" part was literal), an 18 month assignment with no families allowed (what I know about that one deserves its own post), so my mother and I ended up waiting this one out in Carterville, Illinois. It was a really small town with a population at the time (1960-1961) of about 2,600 people. The house we lived in was a tar paper shack, which was a little wooden structure covered in a paper-based material that is tar-coated to be water-resistant. A lot of it (most of it, really) has a fake brick appearance. The house, although it was right in the middle of town, had no electricity, heat, or plumbing. I have no photos of it (Daddy took his camera with him to the Arctic) but found this pic on flickr that resembles it very much. Click to view larger at its source. Seems like our shack was in better shape, even though the front steps were rotten enough for Grandma to fall right through one of them once.
Mother would attach a water hose to the neighbor’s faucet, and ran the hose through a hole in the wall of our little cottage, that was our running water. I am assuming that she had permission to do that. There was a wood-burning potbellied cook-top stove in the house for both cooking and heat. She chopped wood for it every day. I don’t remember any furniture (I guess it was in storage). I do remember sitting on the floor playing with paper dolls while mice scampered around. I am not bothered by mice (luckily).
In the backyard, there was an outhouse, and establishing the boundary of the property in back was an active railroad track. My mother planted a food garden back there, and I remember homegrown corn and strawberries.
I tried to locate the house by looking for the railroad tracks, but Google maps didn't show any. I had to search online for an old map of the town that showed the old tracks.
On Google satellite view you can see the path going through that was left by the old railroad.
I tried locating it by finding my Grade School, seen below, but it has apparently been bulldozed as well, replaced by unremarkable modern buildings.
Look how close we were to the train!! I am amazed. The house next door to the east was even closer.
Here is the current Google street view of the place. It still holds a little house, but an infinitely better one. I got a kick out of the way the residents were captured sitting in their car, with the car parked in the yard, and one of them is sitting in the hatchback! That's a little bit hillbilly, but they've got nothing on us.
Barmaid in a dive, it's a job You wonder how people end up in some situations, and being the barmaid in The Wheel Bar is one of those situations. To briefly sum up the situation, I had just completed 2 years of Fine Art at the Community College... receiving a degree meant for transfer to a 4-year college, but zero job training or career prep, and I had no money to continue with school. The fact was that I needed a job, had no job skills, and did not want to become a hooker. This bar was similar to all the other dive bars that I spent time in growing up (not voluntarily - my cousins and I had to amuse ourselves with the jukebox and such while our folks drank). I was a drinker, and had not worked in a dive or tended bar, so I was open to adding that to my life experiences.
When I walked in, the owner leered at me (as a young woman I was used to that), and said "God damn it. You wanna tend bar?" I did. "Ahright, get yer ass behind this bar afore we take you in the back room and check you for hemorrhoids." Yes, that's really what he said, and I didn't think it was funny, it was just typical old drunk in a bar low-class humor, and I had been sexually harassed on just about every job I'd had, so it was not a deal-breaker and I figured I could withstand it. Funny thing, he didn't even ask me if I was of drinking age (I was 21 [actually I may have been as old as 23], but he didn't card me. Whaddya think? Wouldn't you card me?).
The job paid $15 a day for about 9 hours of work, and it was 6 to 7 days a week. It was paid in cash. I was also allowed to serve myself alcohol, as much as I wanted, and I could have a frozen Tombstone pizza for dinner but had to eat it during the shift. There weren't breaks. Also, there were almost no tips. I'd get maybe a dollar or two during a shift maybe, but I remember one night when we were well into the night and I still hadn't been tipped. I told the owner, and he pounded his fist on the bar and yelled "God damn it!! You sonsabitches tip the god damned barmaid!!" Then a couple of people put quarters on the bar, and not without a grumble.
See, this was the kind of place where it's all regulars. Every night around 5-ish, the same people came in. I knew what their usual drinks were. I had to learn the signals, like the one guy, when he put his empty in just a certain place, that meant he wanted another one. The jokes and banter were the same every night. I heard the hemorrhoid joke nearly every night. I drank all night, and got through it, learned to roll with the punches (it wasn't recommended to go through a night in there sober, I tried it once). Some stayed until closing every night, and if somebody passed out, head on the bar, we could joke about them being "Asleep at the Wheel." The owner and his wife sat all night at opposite ends of the bar, glaring at each and sometimes arguing. When they weren't in the bar, they were upstairs (they lived there, literally).
Next door to The Wheel was a Sunday bar, which they also owned, called The Hub (I think). This was when MO still had the Blue Laws where you couldn't serve more than .03% beer on Sunday, so that's what they did. Hardly anyone would be around other than the most hard-core regulars, just the people who practically lived at The Wheel (or actually lived there). Both places had a jukebox well stocked with hard-core country music, and a pool table. The Wheel also one of those bar shuffleboard machines. One night, some black people came in. They were waiting for a bus or something and came in to play some shuffleboard. It was not the best idea for them to step into a bar that was as rednecky as this one. At The Wheel, they HATED people of color, and when they walked in everybody got a little nervous and jumpy. Pretty soon, the owner's wife told me to reach under the bar and hand her the gun. I refused. Guess I was the one with the risky behavior then, but guns are always bad news. Fortunately, they caught the bad vibes from the hostile stares and walked out. Sigh of relief. See, on that side of the highway it was mostly white and on the other side it was very mixed, and some of those old-timers are not big on diversity, to say the least, and can go over the edge over the smallest thing (just look at the Tea Party).
After a few months, they hired another barmaid. She was going to work days mostly. They really liked her even though she was kind of fat, because she had a pretty face, laughed a lot, had really big boobs and liked the skimpy sundresses. They really liked her, that is, until they found out she was dating a black man (although they never used polite terms) and she got fired on the spot. I was getting pretty tired of that place by then, and got myself hired as a cocktail waitress in a restaurant lounge with a piano bar, where they made me wear itty-bitty shorts with Budweiser logos all over them. I went from serving drinks to food, and then got notified that I'd been hired to work assembly at the GM plant that was in north St. Louis at the time. One of the foreman was a semi-regular at The Wheel, and had helped me get hired there and moved me into the next phase of my working life [I blogged that phase under the tag Autoworker].
I love Google Street View. I looked up this place and it looks like some kind of warehouse now, and except for the lack of bar signage, it looks the same. There's the Sunday bar on the left, the little beige building.
All of this is to the best of my recollection. Your recollection (and even some so-called official facts) may vary wildly, because this one was truly not well-documented into history.
Celebration of Life festival in the swamps of rural Louisiana, 1971. A tale of teenage carelessness, fearlessness, stupidity, irresponsibility, sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. It was pitched as 8 days in the country at summer solstice, and had a lineup advertised that was as good as any I'd seen.
Allman Brothers, Alex Taylor, Amboy Dukes, B.B. King, Ballin jack, the Beach Boys, Bloodrock, Boz Scaggs, Buddy Miles, Butterfield Blues Band, Canned Heat, Chambers Brothers, Chuck Berry, Country Joe McDonald, Delaney & Bonnie and Friends, Dixieland Jazz Bands, Edgar Winter's White Trash, Eric Burdon, Flying Burrito Brothers, Ike and Time Turner Review, It's a Beautiful Day, James Gang, John Hartford, John B. Sebastian, John Lee Hooker, Johnny Winter, Leon Russell, Melanie, Quicksilver Messanger Service, Ravi Shankar, Richie Havens, Roland Kirk, Seatrain, Sly and the Family Stone, Symphony Orchestra, Voices of Harlem, War, Stephen Stills, Neil Young, rumors of Pink Floyd
There's actually some video of this on YouTube. The added soundtrack used was not from a band who played there (actually, very few bands ended up playing there), but the lyrics "I just want to celebrate another day of living" are a bit appropriate for this thing, as it was an ordeal getting through it in one piece.
I had been to several rock festivals before this. December 1968 there was Miami Pop Festival, 1969 there was Atlanta Pop Festival, West Palm Beach Festival, and another Miami Rock Festival, 1970 there was another Atlanta Pop Festival, so 5 major rock festivals under my belt.
I attended all of them with my mother. It's not what you think... my mother was no different from all the kids of the counter-culture of the day except for being about 30 years older. Read about her late-sixties persona and ours lives at that time here, and a little bit more here.
The reason I attended it without my mother was because she had just broken her leg and was on crutches. I didn't want to leave her alone like that, but I was absolutely full of wild & crazy, just got my driver's license 2 weeks ago, absolutely gotta go to this thing and nothin' on earth is going to stop me. She assured me that she would be OK. I had spent every dime I had saved ($200) getting an 11-yr old car so I'd have transport. I put an ad on a college cork message board (in Carbondale IL) for someone to help drive, and found a guy. On the way down, we picked up a couple of guys hitchhiking, they were going to the same place, so that was cool. They had dropped acid, so we didn't let them drive. We got as far as Grenada, Mississippi before getting pulled over by the cops. That's when I discovered that my driver-helper didn't actually have a driver's license. As the owner of the car, and the one with a license, I had to go and sit in the police car while he ran a check on me. He was an absolute stereotype of a southern cop, really fat, country music playing on the radio, and smelling strong of English Leather (a smell I can't tolerate for unrelated personal reasons). He told me to get back in the car and follow him to the station. With only a couple of weeks of driving experience, I was extremely nervous and terrified of screwing that part up in some way. At the station I got a lecture: I was to be the ONLY driver of the vehicle, the name of the town is pronounced "gren-AY-da," not "gren-AH-da," and was charged a fine of $14, which was exactly all the money I had, and we were sent on our way. We got off soooo lucky - it's impossible to say just how lucky that was.
That night we were to reach our destination. The roads were winding and very dark - no lights anywhere. There was an old-timey mystery show playing on a scratchy radio station, there was a ferry-boat ride for us alone that was conducted by a couple of cajuns (I could barely understand what they were saying), and after being lost for who-knows-how-long on that very spooky night, we found the area, with the help of some directions from someone in a gas station which also sold live chickens. We were as far out into the sticks of rural Louisiana as you could get.
Turned out, the locals and the law were doing everything possible to keep this thing from happening, so even though we had tickets, we had to essentially break into the site, along with a few hundred others - hiking through swamp and sawgrass and busting through some kind of a fence (sorry, the memory of that part is a little fuzzy). Inside was nothing. No food, no fresh water, it was officially closed so we were kind of stuck without facilities and basic needs. I could not have been more unprepared... I had brought no food, no tent, no water, no sleeping bag, and thanks to Grenada I had zero money... but... being a 17 year old girl I did not worry about stuff like that. I was invincible.
I got separated from my traveling companions and got hooked up with my first-ever lover (starting many years of a very dysfunctional relationship, but as The Eagles said, we had one thing in common), a good-for-nothing 16 year old with dark hair and a mustache who looked like Jesus Christ, only a lot cuter. He became my personal savior and my worst demon. He was pretty much a druggie, a thief, and a wanna-be biker (and I found out later: an insanely jealous white-power type who verbally and physically abused me and then stalked me. His name was Pete, but he now goes by a different first and last name). I was headed for hell... he talked me into shooting up MDA (the love drug). I had never injected any drugs before (mother prohibited that, and all under her umbrella respected it in her presence. All drugs were fine, but needles were not allowed.) It was an incredible experience like nothing I'd felt previously. I never did anything like that before and never have since. I had dropped acid a few times, and generally dabbled in hallucinogens but had tapered off to pretty much just pot during this time, so this was way out there for me. I got off the ride and didn't get back in line. (These days, I generally have one or two beers or glasses of wine and I'm done. Pretty lightweight.)
Someone finally brought in some water to the festival, it was in a big barrel and we were drinking it, although I doubt it was very clean it was cleaner than the nearby river. I did not get in the nasty river for various reasons, and now glad, as it was being used not only for bathing but as a toilet - also, I don't swim and a few people died from drowning that week. Some people were setting up makeshift food stands, like one that sold watermelon, but I think that one got looted by the masses (including Pete). I remember eating this and that out of some cans, and using a spoon that was found on the ground. My car was outside the site, so we slept in a blanket on the ground. The insects were deafeningly loud through the midsummer night in the swamp. There were bands that finally did play, although my memories of the music at this festival are a lot fuzzier than of others. There was Bloodrock, Sly and the Family Stone, Melanie, the Amboy Dukes, and Stephen Stills (who I remember lecturing us on how crazy we were to be there).
I told Pete I had no gas money to get home, and he reached in his pocket and produced some stolen credit cards. He also stole a license plate and put it on my car. These criminal minds... they think of everything. Yes, I know I became an accomplice at that point, but I was desperate. That's my only excuse. And, no, I couldn't call for money from my mother. We lived on $400 a month, which had to buy her cigarettes as well as everything else, we did not have credit cards or cash on hand. I mentally did a Pontius Pilate washing of hands concerning what he'd done to save our necks. The old clunker was also hemorrhaging transmission fluid, and he poured brake fluid in there to swell up the seals or something, and when the car finally rolled into home in Illinois, it had a failing U-joint - so it was officially a goner, ready for the junkyard.
When I opened up the door, my mother was not home. Turns out, she had been trying to retrieve one of our cats from a tree or the roof or something, had called the police (which brought a policeman who was terrified of cats and was not any help and left), then she had fallen off the porch on her crutches (remember the broken leg?) and broken her arm so she was now off the crutches and in a wheelchair. She had been staying at her mother's house, our cats were outdoors and missing for a few days, and there was a massive flea infestation in the house, which was devoid of cats at the moment. I walked in the door, and what was probably thousands of fleas added themselves to my legs. I still bear the scars from some of those bites. Also, I came down with typhoid fever, followed by some weeks of joint pain. Yeah... all the luck... so if you were wishing me ill following my teenaged debauchery, you got your wish, and worse than that, I ended up linked with Pete for several years, an ill-chosen god. But - I did not end up dead from O.D. or poisoning, stuck in a small-town Mississippi jail, married, or pregnant. That was my good luck.
There's a good thread on this festival over on the "Hip Forums" (a place for the old hippies). Lots of other people's crazy stories there.
More on the Celebration of Life 1971
This article was originally found at http://www.stevenfromholz.com/factsfiction.html, but is gone now (or at least, I can't find it)
Roll...Festivals! (or the 1971 "great festive debacle" in the Louisiana swamp!)
Fourth in a series of articles
By Steven Fromholz
The Dictionary defines “festival” as a feast or celebration or a series of programmed cultural events.
My first festival experience was in June, 1971 at “The Festival of Life,” deep in the swamps of Louisiana – near Baton Rouge. At that time I was employed by Stephen Stills as a guitarist and vocalist in the rock and roll band he had put together – with which to tour nationwide – his second solo album for Atlantic records. The band consisted of myself, the great bassist, Fuzzy Samuels, Paul Harris on keyboards, and Dallas Taylor on drums...and Stills.
We were in Memphis that June, in rehearsals with the Memphis Horns, when Stephen’s management folks received a request from the promoters of the “Festival of Life” which had turned into a disastrous Festival of Death – huge amounts of rain and several people dying there in the mud and the blood and the beer and the drugs of that swampy event. The promoters wanted us to come down on the final evening to close the show and encourage the fans to get the hell out of there in some sort of orderly fashion.
Stills accepted the invitation and that afternoon we were in a Lear Jet winging our way, without the horn section, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. At the airport we were met by a pair of two passenger, bubble-top, Bell Helicopters, which would – with any kind of luck – fly us to the festival site. Stephen went out in one and the rest of the band was overloaded with our instruments – no piano – into the other and off we flew into the deep, dark night that is the Louisiana swamp lands. The rest of the band and I all thought we would probably crash into the swamp, there to be eaten by alligators, and go down in history as a great rock and roll tragedy. We did not crash – as fate would have it, and fate will have it!
We arrived and were escorted to the star’s dressing room where Stills was ensconced, Pasha-like, awaiting our arrival or news of our untimely deaths. We remained in the dressing room for an hour or so, getting high enough to hunt ducks with rakes, until it came time for us to hit the stage and try to close what had become a disastrous event.
I have no idea what time we took the stage but I do remember beginning our set with a jumpin’ version of Stephen’s hit song “Rock and Roll Woman.” The remainder of the set is kind of a blur in my memory but I do recall that because of the lights on stage, not being able to see any of the thousands of people out front – but, I could smell their swampyness with more than just a hint of pot wafting onto the stage. We played five of the six songs we knew as a band and then Stills took to the piano and began his peace and love, brother and sister medley, at which point a loud, male voice at the left front of the stage was heard to exclaim, “Shut-up and play your f----in’ rock ‘n roll.” – which we did!
We then beat a speedy retreat back to the relative safety of the dressing room. I do not know if we were successful in our attempt to end this festive debacle but the boys and I were ready to get the hell out of the swamp and back to our fine hotel rooms and excellent room service of the Commodore Perry Hotel in downtown Memphis. As you can guess, we did not die in a helicopter crash in the swamp on the trip back to Baton Rouge – arriving just in time to see our Lear Jet leave for Memphis without us. We sat in the airport for hours and hours waiting for the first commercial flight to Memphis. I certainly wouldn’t call that experience “a series of programmed cultural events,” but...that is how festivals and I began.
Article previously at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,902996,00.html, Mud, Sweat & Tears, Time Magazine, Monday, Jul 12, 1971.
It was billed as a "celebration of life," but the Louisiana rock festival near the town of McCrea may have marked the end of what began at Woodstock as a beatific American experience and deteriorated into something violent at Altamont and vapid at Powder Ridge. Last week's festival, which lasted only four days instead of the announced eight, was an American nightmare. To begin with, the festival was postponed for three days while the promoters wallowed in legal mire. The kids amused themselves by making human mudpies and bathing in the nude. Two youths drowned in the fast-rushing Atchafalaya River. State undercover narcotics agents circulated in the crowd and made more than 100 busts. One youth died in a hospital tent from a drug overdose. Meanwhile, dazed with blistering heat, and stultifying humidity, the estimated 50,000 youths who gathered to see Country Joe McDonald and John Sebastian were also choked by dust. For the Woodstock Nation, McCrea was a bleak experience of mud, sweat and tears.
The festival began Thursday night--three and one-half days late--with Yogi Bahjan taking the stage, chanting and saying, 'God bless you. Let us meditate for one minute for peace and brotherhood.' 'Fuck you. Let's boogie,' responded a member of the crowd.
A tractor pulling two flatbed trailers would come around, and six hired hands would jump off to collect endless piles of rotting watermelon rinds, empty wine bottles, discarded clothing and other assorted garbage.
A festival worker ODed backstage and crumpled to the floor as 'Sister Morphine' was being played over the P.A. system to an impatient audience.
Finally, there was dope, and it was plentiful. You had only to walk to the intersection of Cocaine Row and Smack Street (as the makeshift signs proclaimed) to find dealers hawking an estimated 30 varieties of mindbender, only two of which could be smoked. Plastic syringes, at $1 apiece, were selling briskly.
[addendum added Jan 7, 2012: http://blog.chron.com/40yearsafter/2011/06/celebrating-life-the-hard-way/", Post from Houston Chronicle]
[addendum added May 28, 2021: Documentary, McCrea 1971]
Here's part 3 of my low-rent travelogue that follows this one. After we were denied the opportunity to join my dad at Johnston Island by the Air Force, he was transferred to Hawaii in 1956 and we were soon to follow after being temporarily stranded in San Francisco waiting on the Air Force's "ride" -- I don't remember where we stayed or for how long, but I know my mother was HOPPING mad at the Salvation Army over something, I think it was because they turned us away when we were broke. I will also never forget her story about ordering some Chop Suey in a restaurant there, seeing something in it that looked a lot like a tail, and when she asked the waitress what it was, she replied "salamander."
I was about to make my first airplane flight, and it could have ended up being much more memorable (in a bad way) because one of the engines caught fire while we were over the ocean. Somehow we managed to land in Hawaii and it was not by raft or helicopter so disaster was avoided.
The video above (which is someone's modern video, but nothing has changed about it) provides the sound track for this post, it's one of the songs (with dance moves) that I learned while living there - and I may have driven everybody crazy singing The Hukilau and Honolulu Hicki Boola Boo... or maybe not. It really was just one loooong party where people wore their swimsuits all the time and were either dancing, drinking, singing, playing an instrument, or all of the above.
Here I am trying to play my ukulele with some of our neighbors.
There's my record player on the floor, add some refreshments and some Hawaiian garb and it's a party.
We lived there no more than 2 years and I was about 4 when we left, so I don't have the usual type of touristy memories. My mother and grandmother had told me that a praying mantis would spit tobacco juice in your eyes, so I remember trying to get back to our apartment when I saw that I had to pass what seemed like a giant praying mantis, so I was frozen with fear and couldn't get past him.
More of the neighbor kids, probably other military kids. That's me sitting on the ground. I've never been much of a ham.
I also remember being absolutely horrified at the sight of hot lava. I mean, how many kids get to see bubbling molten lava in person? I developed a great fear and fascination with volcanoes. I never visited another one, but found the story of Pompeii to be one of the scariest things I ever read.
My mother at the beach, looking stylish in 1956. She was naturally very thin. I didn't inherit that trait. She actually used to drink those weight-gain concoctions but they never worked.
You had to have a muumuu. I still have this one. It's probably valuable. All I need is a buyer.
My mother, dressed up and sitting by the Banyan tree.
I very seldom saw my dad when he was not in uniform, but here's an exception.
and here's me wearing the same outfit (not just a matching outfit - the same one)
Except for the gigantic tobacco juice-spitting bugs, the bubbly hot molten lava, and getting a really short haircut, Hawaii was one of the nicest places we were assigned to live. I'd love to go back someday.
The next Chapter will be about the Florida panhandle and living on a chicken farm. For previous installments, click on the "lifestory" label.
Here's Chapter 2 of my Growing-Up-Military series, which I started last summer when I wrote about my first 2 years in Phoenix (1953-1955). After spending 6 more months in Colorado while my dad took a class, he was headed for Johnston Island and we were to follow shortly. I was a precocious little thing (disgustingly so), and managed to get in front of an open mic radio broadcast where I recited the Lord's Prayer from memory, and dedicated it to my mother and to each grandparent and to my daddy who was on his way to Johnston Island.
Johnston Island was originally used as a bird sanctuary until the American military took it over. The island was only a quarter mile wide and a mile long at the time (it has since gotten larger through dredging), so the base took up every square inch of it and made it resemble an aircraft carrier.
These scans are from an orientation booklet that they gave the guys - and I do mean "guys" because there were almost no women on the island at all - and the booklet points out in a couple of places that they can get all their necessities there - except "dolls".
My dad was very lucky that he wasn't there after 1958 because they started doing nuclear testing. The detonations were in space overhead, but there was one mishap (Starfish Prime) that caused the island to get a good dusting of plutonium, along with quite a few other thermonuclear events (Operation Dominic and others)
The base was used as a storage facility for all sorts of WMDs in the 70s, including nuke stuff, chemical weapons, sarin, Agent Orange, mustard gas... and there were a number of accidents involving those too during the 1990s (see the link). By 2003 the incredibly massive stockpiles and the facility were destroyed, and the island has been redesignated as a wildlife sanctuary, although not exactly the same condition that Mother Nature would have preferred. Below, a few barrels of Agent Orange, some leaky, from this website.
My mother and I didn't go to Johnston Island. The military didn't end up allowing us to go there, so our poverty forced us to have to move in with my maternal grandparents in Carbondale IL. They had a "room" in their basement, and those quote marks are appropriate as it was just an area with a couple of cots. The coal furnace was down there with us, and somebody had to continuously shovel the coal into the furnace to keep the heat going so it was a sooty and smelly place to live, although not the worst place I ever lived. It was very much the opposite of our next destination: Hawaii 1956. That will be Chapter 3.
Here's your soundtrack for this post, from 1953 - Frank Sinatra.
For my birthday (on the 24th) I put together a small collection of scans from that place and time, Phoenix Arizona in the early 1950s. We lived there until 1955, when we went to Hawaii for a short time. Click any pics to enlarge. I was born on Luke AFB, which has an awful lot to do with my life in general. People ask where I'm from... I say "the Air Force." Here's a picture of the doctor who delivered me. It's from a hardback book that is exactly like a high school yearbook (published a year after I was born). We lived in a little red trailer off-base somewhere, then later moved to a duplex.
Here are my folks with their new little bundle of joy.
I suppose I needed a bath. My mother seems to have dressed up for the occasion. I did the opposite.
Here's my mother getting a similar kind of bath. Not really. It's one of those fairground photo booths, fun for the whole family. (I more than half expect photobucket to yank this one, along with another one of these I have posted there.)
A bunch of little cowpokes from the neighborhood.
Here's a bunch of other kids playing grownup. Those cigarettes are a nice touch, aren't they? Candy cigs, I'm sure. Well, maybe not so sure.
A hilarious picture of my mother Lola, a sausage, and a couple of my dad's sisters Ethel and Ruth. The "in-law" relations were always pretty bad, despite the smiles for the picture, but then they were smiling for their little brother.
For recreation, we would drive out into the desert somewhere and have a picnic. There's our car in the background by the saguaro. My folks drank coffee practically by the bucket, and what sounds better when you're out in the middle of the Arizona desert than a steaming hot cup of coffee? That's right. Nothing. My parents loved their coffee so much that once when on a camping trip, they boiled some hot dogs, then realized there wasn't enough water left for coffee, so they made it out of the weenie water.
For a side job to being in the Air Force, my dad was part of the pit crew at Manzanita Speedway for Tucson race car driver Bill Cheesbourg. He racked up some fairly impressive stats in his life. I don't think this is his car. The two sports I my parents liked were car racing and wrestling.
Another fun family event, visiting the carnival and watching the freaks sideshow.
Jesus, please don't leave me and let me go to Hell.
I don't remember this place, but everywhere we lived I got to spend a lot of time in the various dives, honkytonks, taverns, etc. On the back of this was handwritten to my dad, "To Bill, Just to remind you alway about the 3 Sister, July Betty & Jessie" (sic)
