Monday Memories: My Home Town Revisited

A number of years ago, I did a series of blog posts called Monday Memories in which I waxed nostalgic about all sorts of things from my childhood growing up in a small Texas town called Azle. The first one featured an aerial photo of Azle taken in 1938. A friend of mine named Jim Magnuson recently read those blog posts and was inspired to start a series of drone videos on Facebook called "Azle, Then and Now". The first one is an updated version of the photo I published and can be seen here. Jim plans to do more of these and I'm really looking forward to seeing what he comes up with.

And maybe I'll do some more Monday Memories posts, if I can think of things to write about. I'm not getting any younger, you know.

Manhunter: The Deluxe Edition - Archie Goodwin and Walter Simonson

In the summer of 1973, I drove up to Denton, Texas, to look for an apartment because I was attending what was then North Texas State University and didn’t want to live in the dorm again when the fall semester started. While I was there, I stopped by Fultz News Agency on the square downtown to check out the comic books and paperbacks. One of the comics I picked up was an issue of DETECTIVE COMICS with a new back-up feature: MANHUNTER, a revival of an old Golden Age character brought to the current day and enmeshed in a thriller/espionage plotline. It was written by Archie Goodwin, a writer whose work I enjoyed, with art by Walter Simonson, a relative newcomer.

I became a fan immediately, and since I was already buying DETECTIVE on a regular basis to read the Batman stories in it, I followed the Manhunter story as well and thoroughly enjoyed it. But it was designed to be a limited storyline, and after half a dozen backup stories and a full-length crossover with Batman, that was it. The whole thing came to an end, and while I remembered it fondly, I never reread it in the more than five decades since then.

However, recently I noticed that the digital version of the collected edition was on sale, so I picked it up and read the whole thing again. Sometimes that proves to be a mistake. A while back on Kindle Unlimited I noticed another series I’d read 50+ years ago that was written and drawn by one of my favorite comics creators (who shall remain nameless), so I revisited it. I read part of the first issue, said to myself, “This makes no sense at all”, and returned it. Sometimes you just had to be there when it was new.

Thankfully, that’s not the case with MANHUNTER. I still thought it was great. I love the way Goodwin and Simonson tied it in with the original Golden Age character. The plot is maybe a tad bit thin, but the scripts move right along and Simonson’s art is excellent. The crossover with Batman is handled well. There’s an epilogue by Simonson published after Goodwin passed away, a silent story with no dialogue but using the plot Goodwin and Simonson worked out, and it’s quite good, too. I was glad I gave this one another try. If you read it back then, maybe you should revisit it, too. If you’ve never read it but enjoy Silver Age DC, it’s well worth checking out.

By the way, I did find an apartment on that trip to Denton. It was a crappy little place on Normal Street, for those of you familiar with Denton. I lived there for a year, which was the only time of my life I could say with any justification that I lived on Normal Street. I didn't care for apartment living and commuted for the rest of my college career, even though it was a pretty long drive. I do have a few good memories from that year to go with the noisy neighbors and lousy plumbing.

Monday Memories: Another One Rides the Bus

Starting in first grade and continuing through most of my public school career, I rode the bus to and from school nearly every day. It came along the service road next to the highway and stopped at our street around eight o’clock in the morning. I always tried to get down the street to the corner a few minutes before that so I wouldn’t miss the bus. The few times that happened, I had to trudge back up the hill to our house and my mother had to take me to school, much to her annoyance.

The people who lived in one of the houses on the corner had a boat, and they kept it in a shed that was fairly close to the road. The shed had no front, but it had sides, a back, and a roof, so when it was raining, or very cold, the kids waiting for the bus crowded into the shed for protection from the elements. We had no trouble hearing the bus’s rumbling engine as it came along the service road toward our street.

Most of the time we waited outside, though, and of course, being kids, we came up with games to play. Since there was a ditch on both sides of the street, we used the one alongside the boat shed for a game called “Quicksand Monster”. One kid would get in the ditch and serve as the Quicksand Monster. The others had to jump back and forth over the ditch while the Quicksand Monster tried to catch one of them and haul him or her in. When that happened, the kid who got caught became the Quicksand Monster, and so the game continued. I have no idea who gave it that name, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t me. I imagine other kids in other places played variations of the same game, but I never heard or read any other references to calling it Quicksand Monster.

The bus had already made three stops before it picked us up. After we got on, it continued on up the service road, made one more stop at the corner of another street, then turned, crossed over the highway, and headed back toward town and the various schools. Some years, the bus I rode also made several stops at a neighborhood on the other side of the highway to pick up the kids who lived there, but when that happened we were really crowded in and really had too many kids on there. I don’t recall that ever being a permanent situation.

Most of the time, after making the one stop beyond our street, the bus returned to the high school first to let off those kids, then cut through some back streets and a residential area to get to the elementary school I attended. Along the way we passed a big concrete watering trough on the corner of some land where people kept cattle. I first noticed that watering trough in the fall of 1959, when I was in first grade. I drive by there occasionally now, and I always look over at it. The watering trough is still there—or at least it was the last time I went by. That corner hasn’t changed in the almost sixty years since then.

Anyway, as I got older, I began riding on past the elementary school to the junior high, which was the last stop. The bus barn was located there. And finally, when I reached high school, I got off at the first stop every morning.

The routine in the afternoon was much the same, except that route started at the elementary school, went by the junior high, and then the high school last before heading out the highway to the area where I lived. My street was the fourth stop. The bus usually got there about five minutes until four o’clock in the afternoon, which meant I could hurry up the street and get in the front door in time to watch MIGHTY MOUSE or HUCKLEBERRY HOUND or THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN, whichever was running in that time slot that year. Much later, I made sure I got home in time to watch reruns of THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E., which one of the local stations showed every weekday.

I remember missing the bus in the afternoon only one time, and I couldn’t tell you the reason why. But I was in high school, I know that (the old campus, the one’s that now a junior high). It was about a mile and a half from my house, so I decided to walk home instead of trying to call my mother and ask her to come get me. It wasn’t a problem; I was young, and it was only a mile and a half. And I remember enjoying that walk quite a bit. You see a lot of details when you’re walking that you never notice when you’re riding in a bus. I got home about half an hour later than usual, so I probably missed something on TV, but I don’t think I cared. However, that was the only time I ever walked home, so I didn’t enjoy it so much that I started doing it on a regular basis.

Over the years I rode various buses: 5, 15, and 33 are the only numbers I recall. But they were all virtually identical, so it didn’t really matter. They weren’t air-conditioned, of course, but we would let the windows down on hot days. I had a few friends, some from my street and a few from the street where the bus stopped just before us. I don’t recall ever being picked on, although that certainly happened to some kids. Being a fat little nerd, I had learned at a young age to keep my head down and be as invisible as possible in such situations.

That’s the way my bus riding went until the first day of my junior year of high school. The morning ride was normal, but that afternoon when I got on the bus to go home, it followed such a long, circuitous route that it was 5:30 before I walked in the door. Being accustomed to getting home by four o’clock, this delay was flatly unacceptable. I needed that hour and a half for reading comic books and paperbacks or watching TV or playing football, baseball, or basketball. Since I had my driver’s license by then, I asked my dad if I could have a car and start driving to school. He knew a guy who had a used car lot (as I’ve mentioned before, no matter what you needed, my dad Knew A Guy) and within days, I had a car. It was an olive-drab Oldsmobile, a ’66 model, I think, ugly as sin and one step above a junker, to boot. But it ran—most of the time—and I no longer had to ride the bus. That led, the next school year when I was a senior, to the one, count it, one semester of public school that I truly enjoyed, the second semester of my senior year when I came in late and left early.

I wasn’t fond of riding the bus. I wouldn’t say that I absolutely hated it. Most days it was just part of the overall experience of going to school, not really good or bad, just something that had to be gotten through. But by the time my kids were school age, Livia and I were both working at home as full-time writers, so we made our own schedules and one of us was always able to take the girls to school and pick them up. They rode buses for field trips and other extracurricular activities, of course, but never to or from school. That was fine with me, because I always enjoyed those trips with them. They may have missed a few experiences by not riding the bus, but on the other hand, we listened to the radio and we waved at the donkey in the field where we always turned and we went by the house where all the weiner dogs lived and hoped they would be outside so we could see them running around and playing. I hope those moments were worth something to the girls. They certainly were to me. More than any bus ride I ever took.

Monday Memories: A Christmas Memory

Remember what I said a couple of days ago about the kid on that RANCH ROMANCES cover reminding me of me? Well, now you can see why. Yes, that's me, wearing my Bat Masterson outfit. I know this picture was taken on Christmas Day, and I'm pretty sure the year was 1959, which would make me six years old. I'm also certain it was taken in the living room of my Aunt Annie's house in Blanket, Texas. I'd gotten the outfit as a Christmas present that morning and insisted on wearing it when we went to Blanket. I was a big fan of the TV show starring Gene Barry. I also had a Kit Carson outfit and numerous toy guns based on guns used in various Western TV shows. So it's not the least bit surprising that I turned out like I did.

Monday Memories: Radio

I was too young for the Golden Age of radio drama (although I’ve heard plenty of great Old Time Radio as an adult), but I was right on time for the Golden Age of Top 40 radio. I don’t know exactly when FM radio became popular, mostly in the late Sixties and early Seventies, I think, but in the late Fifties and early Sixties, we were all about AM radio, baby. That was the only band on our car radios and the little transistor radios we carried around in our hip pockets. The sound quality may not have been great, but we listened to them all the time anyway.

My favorite station was KXOL, 1360 on your radio dial in Fort Worth. There were two popular Top 40 stations in Fort Worth, the other one being KFJZ, 1270 AM. You had your KXOL guys, and you had your KFJZ guys. I was a KXOL guy, through and through. There was also a Top 40 station in Dallas, KLIF, but to be honest, I didn’t know anybody who listened to it. Maybe their signal didn’t get over into our part of the country very well.

KXOL had some history to it. George Carlin and Jack Burns worked there as DJs. Bob Schieffer was part of the news department. A couple of national number one hit songs, “Hey Baby” by Bruce Channel and “Hey, Paula” by Paul & Paula, were recorded at a nearby sound studio and had their debuts on KXOL. Paul & Paul were actually named Ray Hildebrand and Jill Jackson and became Christian music artists later on. I saw them perform live at the church I attended, and I’m pretty sure they still sang “Hey, Paula”.

I didn’t always get to listen to what I wanted, though. My dad was a TV repairman, and sometimes I’d go with him when he made his service calls. He listened to a country music station, KBOX (I don’t recall the frequency), and of course the announcers pronounced it just as you’d expect, kaybox, except when doing official station IDs. I didn’t really mind, though. I’ve always been able to listen to just about any kind of music.

During the summers, I spent a lot of time at my aunt’s house in Blanket, Texas, and while I was there I listened to KBWD out of Brownwood. It still exists, but it’s a country station now instead of Top 40 like it was in those days. I remember sitting on the porch of her house with a transistor playing “Light My Fire” or “If You’re Going to San Francisco” while I was reading paperbacks or going through my aunt’s old copies of THE SATURDAY EVENING POST and reading all the fiction.

Another summer, I pretty much lived at my sister’s house, and that was the year I started listening to “Music ‘Til Dawn”, the all-night Easy Listening/Adult Contemporary program I did a blog post about several years ago. Like I said, I enjoyed many different kinds of music and loved what I heard on that program on KRLD out of Dallas.

One thing I liked to do during that era was to turn down the sound late at night, press the radio to my ear, and slowly go through the dial, trying to see how many stations I could hear, and from how far away. When I caught the signal skip just right at night, I was able to hear St. Louis and Chicago pretty regularly, and of course XERF came blasting in from across the border in Mexico. It was all English-language programming, mostly religious, but it didn’t have to abide by FCC regulations.

Along about the same time, I became a fan of WFAA, a Dallas station that was Adult Contemporary during the day and talk radio at night. It was a sister station of WBAP, a country station in Fort Worth, and they had an odd frequency-sharing arrangement. Part of the day, WFAA was at 570 and WBAP was at 820. Then, after a certain number of hours, they would switch frequencies. I never knew why they did this. I’m sure there was some sort of business or regulatory reason. But it made keeping up with them a little difficult. Eventually, WFAA settled into the 570 frequency, and WBAP took over the 820 frequency permanently, where it still is, I believe. WFAA radio is long gone. But I was a regular listener, especially during college, when I seldom missed the late night talk show hosted by Ed Busch.

Radio lost a lot of its charm once I got older and the FM band dominated the industry, although I was a fan of KOAI (“the Oasis”), a smooth jazz station that was in Dallas for a while. And when our daughters were young and I was driving them to school and various activities during the Nineties, I listened to a lot of Top 40 again, only it was their Top 40, not mine. I liked quite a few of the songs, though. These days, we have satellite radio in the car, and I listen to smooth jazz, New Age, classic rock, metal, whatever I’m in the mood for at the moment. Music doesn’t play nearly as big a part in my life as it once did, but still, when the right song comes on the radio, I turn it up. And now and then . . . if I’m by myself . . . and if I hear the opening chords of Three Dog Night’s “Joy to the World” . . . yeah, that’s me bellowing out “Jeremiah was a bullfrog!” at the top of his lungs like an idiot. A happy idiot.

Monday Memories: The Ski Jump

You can get a pretty good idea how long somebody has been around Azle by how they react if you mention the Ski Jump. If they have no idea what you’re talking about, they probably haven’t been in town long, since everybody hears about the Ski Jump sooner or later. But only those of us who have been around here since the early Sixties know why it’s called that.

First of all, despite the fact that the town is just west of Eagle Mountain Lake, there are no actual mountains anywhere around Azle, and certainly not any where anybody would be skiing. People do water ski on the lake, and for all I know there might be some ramps somewhere that they use for jumping. But that has nothing to do with the Ski Jump.

As far back as I remember, the street where I lived turned off the service road of State Highway 199, which was a four-lane, divided highway with a grass median between the eastbound and westbound lanes and also a two-lane, two-way service road on each side, also separated from the highway by grass medians. It was a nice highway for the time, but I recall, early on in my life, it ran for less than half a mile past the street where I lived and then abruptly ended at a crossover, except for the service road on our side of the highway, which curved to the left and continued on through downtown Azle. The state had built the divided highway that far and then stopped, I guess because they had to wait for more funds to become available.

Sometime around 1959 or ’60, construction began to extend the divided highway around downtown. Main Street, which had been Highway 199, would be designated Loop 344 (which it is to this day). However, some engineer came up with an interesting idea for the exit ramp to that loop. Instead of an exit to the right from the westbound lanes, after which traffic for the downtown loop would continue along that service road to an overpass or underpass, the two westbound lanes of the highway climbed an embankment, at the top of which they split. The right-hand lane continued on, while the left-hand lane made a very sharp turn to the left, onto a bridge that crossed over the eastbound lanes and then descended to merge with Main Street. Got that?

I have a hunch you can figure out what happened after this oddly designed left-hand exit opened around 1961. It was new, so people weren’t really familiar with it, and some of them were driving too fast, and there may have been alcohol involved at times (Highway 199, also known as the Jacksboro Highway, was infamous for the beer joints that lined it on both sides from downtown Fort Worth all the way to Azle) . . .

Yep, you’re right. Several times over the next couple of years, for whatever reasons, drivers suddenly found themselves at the top of that rise and couldn’t make the sharp turn to the left. Instead they crashed through the guard rail and their cars sailed through the air—like skiers coming off a ski jump—and landed either in the median or in the eastbound lanes of the highway, resulting in fatalities, many injuries, and much destruction. It was a mess.

So, realizing their mistake, the highway department closed down that exit, leveled off the embankment leading up to it, and laid down two regular lanes of highway on that side. They built a standard right-hand exit to the westbound service road a couple of hundred yards back. And since the bridge over the eastbound lanes was still there, they just extended it over the westbound lanes as well, over to the service road, where people who wanted to go to downtown Azle could turn onto it, follow it over the highway, and then swoop down to Main Street on the remaining part of what had already become known far and wide as the Ski Jump.

And even though the deadly design responsible for that name has been gone for almost sixty years, people around here still call that bridge the Ski Jump, although I suspect fewer and fewer of them do so, and many of the ones who do don’t really know why it’s called that. I’m sure there’ll come a time when nobody knows, and after that a time when nobody even calls it that anymore. But a lot of us will remember as long as we’re around, and now you know the rest of the story, too, as Paul Harvey used to say.

Monday Memories: Livestock

I wrote about dogs and cats in a previous installment of this series, but those weren’t the only animals we had when I was a kid. Both of my parents came from a rural background, growing up in the country or in very small farming communities during the Depression, so having livestock around just came natural to them. Our large backyard was divided into three sections: the half right behind the house, which was the actual backyard part and had a wire fence running all the way across it; and the back part, divided into unequal sections by another fence running at right angles to the first one, all the way back to the creek. There was also a barbed wire fence all across the back of the property, along the creek. The larger back section on the left (looking at it from the house) was the cow pen; the smaller area to the right was the chicken pen.

Now, honestly, I don’t know if the property was divided that way when my parents bought it, or if my dad put up those fences to create those two pens. But it was that way as far back as I can remember. We didn’t always have a cow (more about that later), but we always had chickens.

This was the mid-Fifties, and the street where we lived wasn’t actually in the city limits at this time, so there were no restrictions or ordinances to worry about. If you wanted to have a flock of chickens, nobody was going to stop you. We had a pair of roosters and probably eight or ten hens. I named the roosters: Pete and Joe. (I had not yet entered my “oddly named pets” phase.) If any of the hens had names, I’ve forgotten them.

In the back corner of the chicken pen was the chicken house, where the hens had nests where they slept and laid their eggs. It was my job, at least part of the time, to gather those eggs. I didn’t mind all that much, although I was a little squeamish about all the droppings. But I don’t recall ever having any real trouble gathering eggs.

It did bother me, however, when my parents decided they didn’t actually need two roosters. I’ll never forget following my dad down to the pen where he grabbed either Pete or Joe, whichever one of the poor creatures he was able to catch, and promptly wrung his neck. Head popped right off. I was horrified. And then I had to help pluck the carcass. Maybe that’s why, for a long time, I didn’t care much for fried chicken. (Spoiler alert: I got over it.)

I also fed the chickens some and enjoyed scattering the chicken feed. In those days it didn’t take much to entertain us.

My other memory involving the chickens has to do with the chicken house. One time when we were down in Blanket visiting relatives, a huge windstorm came through Azle, knocked a big tree branch down on top of the little room on the other side of our garage my father used for his TV repair shop, and turned the chicken house over. It sat on a concrete slab but didn’t have a floor and wasn’t fastened down in any way. It was just four walls and a roof. But the storm didn’t damage it, just tipped it over, so my dad, my older brother, and some of my brother’s friends got behind it and just pushed it back upright. I’d never seen an actual building you could do that to.

Speaking of my brother, he was in high school at the time, took ag classes, and was a member of the Future Farmers of America. As one of his FFA projects, he raised a cow in our cow pen, which had a shed in it as well as an enclosed, attached room where we stored feed. The cow eventually had a calf, and we had fresh milk as well as a cute little calf to raise, which we did, until the time when (yes, you saw this coming, didn’t you?) they slaughtered and ate it! At least they took it somewhere else to have all that done, so I didn’t have to watch it. But again, not one of my favorite childhood memories.

Later on, we had a young bull we kept in that pen. I don’t recall why. This was late enough my brother would have been out of high school, so it wasn’t an FFA project. Since he was in college, or maybe even married by then, it became my job to feed the bull. I hated that bull. I hardly ever went in that pen without him chasing me. He never knocked me down and trampled me, but he butted me numerous times. He’d been dehorned so I didn’t get gored, but I still didn’t like it. Eventually, he wound up in the freezer, too. That bothered me a little (I’m soft-hearted, I guess), but not as much as the other livestock we ate.

In addition to all this, our next door neighbor was the ag teacher at the high school and the FFA sponsor, and his son raised hogs and sheep in the rear part of their backyard, which was fenced off like ours. For some reason, I loved those hogs and would go over there every chance I got to help slop them. I know, that doesn’t sound like me, but I really enjoyed working with them. Some of the huge boars were a little scary, but overall I never had any trouble with the hogs. The sheep, on the other hand, did not like me and I didn’t like them. One of the rams really had it in for me and came up behind me and butted me many times. I don’t think anybody else around the circle cared for having a hog and sheep farm in the neighborhood, but I liked it.

By the time I was in high school, all the chickens had died and we had no cattle. My dad decided to take down all the fences and make the whole thing a huge backyard. He tore down the cow shed and had a metal storage barn built. I think he sold or gave the chicken house to somebody who hauled it off to use it for the same purpose. I could still show you where the fences ran and where the shed and the chicken house were (I think the metal storage barn is still there), but as I’ve said before, somebody else lives there now. I doubt if anybody on the street has chickens now, since the city probably frowns on such things. When my dad was still alive, he did have a garden for a while in what had been the cow pen, but that was the extent of his agricultural activities. I was never really a country kid, but I got a taste of that life, anyway, both the good and the bad, and I’m grateful for that.

Monday Memories: Halloween

Halloween was a pretty big deal when I was young. As I’ve mentioned before, I lived on a circle, and depending on who had moved in or out, there were between 15 and 20 kids of trick-or-treating age in the neighborhood, plus others who came from nearby neighborhoods on that night. So it wasn’t uncommon to see several dozen kids dressed in costumes wandering around the circle on Halloween. Almost all the houses gave out candy, although usually one or two didn’t. My friends and I had a great time and I looked forward to Halloween for months beforehand . . . admittedly, mostly for the candy, but I enjoyed figuring out what costume I wanted to wear, too.

One year my mother made me a ghost costume out of an old sheet. That happened to be the year it was cold and rainy, but I went out anyway and by the time I got home my ghost costume was mud up to the knees. Well, like I said, it was an old sheet, so it went right in the trash.

Those good times lasted until I was about twelve. Nobody older than that trick-or-treated in those days. It wasn’t cool. So I became the official dispenser of candy at our house for a few years, until I was in high school and went running around with my friends instead. We were basically good kids so we never really got into any trouble (although there were a few times we came close). One of the local TV stations also showed monster movies on Halloween most years, so I watched a lot of those, too.

One year during high school, a friend of mine decided to dress up as Dracula. He came over to my house to hang around in the shadows near the front porch and jump out to scare the kids when they came up to trick-or-treat. When he got there, he decided to act like he was going to suck my blood, and I put out a hand to ward him off. Unfortunately, his costume had several straight pins in it, and one of them went right into the ball of my hand. We had some real blood that Halloween to go with the fake stuff. But it was a minor injury and the rest of the evening went well. Many scares were delivered to the neighborhood kids.

That was also the evening I tried to get a little romance going with one of the girls who lived on the circle, but there were no tricks or treats in that area.

Halloween was pretty much a non-factor for me during my college years. I’m sure there were parties, but I didn’t go to them. I might have watched a monster movie for nostalgia’s sake now and then. And after Livia and I got married, we lived in the country, so we didn’t have trick-or-treaters to deal with. When our kids came along and got old enough to want to trick-or-treat, we took them over to the circle and I walked around with them and recaptured a little of that old magic for a while. But it was already not nearly as big a deal as it had been when I was growing up. More houses were dark, and there weren’t as many kids out.

We also took the girls to various “Fall Festivals” at church, which by some coincidence just happened to fall on October 31 . . .

Now, I haven’t even seen a trick-or-treater in close to twenty years. I don’t know if the kids who live over on the circle ever get out and do that or not. I hope the tradition lives on somewhere and is as fun and innocent as it was all those years ago. I kind of doubt it . . . but I hope so anyway.

Monday Memories: The Creek

I’ve mentioned the creek that ran behind my parents’ house several times, so I thought maybe I should write a little more about it. Officially, on the maps, it’s the Paschal Branch of Ash Creek, Ash Creek being one of the major creeks that runs through this area. We always just called it the creek. It’s spring-fed and rises in some rugged hills about two miles west of where I grew up. One time some friends and I followed it all the way to its source in an area we called the cliffs because there were so many steep sandstone bluffs. I’ve used those memories as visual references in many scenes I’ve written over the years, transporting them in my fiction to different locations all over the West. Since it’s spring-fed, I don’t believe the creek has ever run dry in my lifetime. I’ve never seen it when it didn’t have water in it, and sometimes, during floods, it could get pretty big. It merges with the main branch of Ash Creek on the other side of the highway, maybe half a mile from where I lived then, and shortly thereafter flows into Eagle Mountain Lake.

That gives you some geographical background, but we seldom ventured beyond the stretch that ran behind the houses on the street where I lived, and that was just a few hundred yards long. In those days, of course, our parents had no idea where we were most of the time, and there were cliffs, snakes, bobcats, and all kinds of other ways for us to hurt ourselves, but we all survived with no major injuries as far as I know. The worst I ever hurt myself playing along the creek was when I ran into a single strand of barbed wire fence that somebody had strung between two trees for some reason and ripped a good gash in my forehead. I don’t know what my mother thought when I came running in with blood all over my face. I got hurt a lot worse mowing the back yard one day, though, when the mower threw a little piece of metal all the way through my leg like a chunk of shrapnel.

One of my most vivid memories of the creek involves the swimming hole, which I mentioned in a previous post. We built a log, rock, and mud dam across the creek, which didn’t stop it completely but backed it up enough to form the swimming hole. It wasn’t much of one, though: maybe twelve feet across and a foot and a half deep. In other words, you couldn’t actually swim in it, but you could get in and splash around some. I was around fifteen years old at the time.

Now, the rest of the story gets a little racy, so those of you with delicate sensibilities may want to skip to the end.

There were four of us who regularly spent time at the swimming hole: me, a girl my age, and a boy and girl a little younger. We were down there clowning around in the water one day, as usual, when the straps on the one-piece bathing suit one of the girls was wearing suddenly gave out. The front of the suit dropped, and there they were: bare boobs. The first time I’d ever laid eyes on such a wondrous sight in the flesh.

Now, lest you think this is about to turn into some Seventies porn movie (boom-chicka-wow-wow!), we were all just friends, there was never anything the least bit romantic between any of us, and she immediately pulled the suit up, tied the straps together securely, and we all had a good laugh about it. Despite that, the memory remains clear in my mind, fifty years later.

The sad part is that of the four of us who were there that day, two are gone for sure, that I know of, and the third one may be, too, because we lost touch many years ago. It’s entirely possible that I may be the only person left alive who remembers what happened at the swimming hole that summer day so long ago. But I’ll cling to the memory for a while yet, just as I will all the other memories of good friends and good days spent roaming up and down the creek.

Monday Memories: The Volcano

As I’ve probably mentioned before, a creek ran behind the houses on the street where I grew up. It had steep banks that seemed really high when I was a kid. In places, they actually were twenty or thirty feet tall. We’re lucky none of us ever fell off and busted an arm or a leg—or a neck. But as far as I recall, none of us were ever hurt playing along the creek other than the occasional scratch or bruise.

On the other side of the creek was a large pasture that was anywhere from fifty to a couple of hundred yards wide, depending on the course of the creek, and on the other side of it was a small country road. That pasture was part of our stomping grounds, too, of course. I remember one Saturday morning I was with a couple of friends, and after crossing the creek by jumping from rock to rock, we climbed up the trail on the opposite bank and came out into the field bent on some adventure I no longer recall.

But then we stopped in our tracks and stared at something new that had appeared seemingly overnight. From our point of view, it was a huge, steep, circular bank of dirt that sloped in. As we stood there gazing at it in awe, one of my friends asked what it was.

I said, “I think it’s a volcano.”

Now, I knew good and well it wasn’t a volcano, and my friends quickly figured out that it wasn’t, but for a minute or so I had them going. And it was certainly an intriguing thought, that a volcano could pop up in the pasture behind our houses. That would have been pretty cool.

We climbed up to the top, and as those of you who have lived in the country have probably figured out already, it was just a stock tank, a big ring of dirt shoved up with a tractor to catch rain and provide water for the cows who grazed in that pasture. (That's not the actual tank in the picture above, that's just a photo I found on the Internet, but the one we saw looked a lot like that.) The ground sloped down toward the creek so the bank was a lot lower on one side and the cows could get to the water without any trouble. When the pond it created was full, it was probably fifty feet wide and maybe two feet deep. Certainly not deep enough for anybody to use it as a swimming hole. (We did have a swimming hole in the creek for a while, after some of us dammed it up . . . but that’s another story.)

Anyway, the volcano name stuck, and that’s what we called it from then on. We played some around that tank over the years. Any mound of dirt, if little boys were around, was going to get war played around it sooner or later in those days. One time I was running along the top of it when I tripped and fell and put out a hand to catch myself . . . right into a clump of cactus. That was not fun, and I still remember my mother using tweezers to pick at least a hundred cactus needles out of my palm. I’d like to think that I bore the ordeal in stony, heroic silence, but that’s probably not what actually happened.

Eventually somebody put a mobile home in that pasture, and years after that I think there was a gas well in it. But the volcano remained right where it was, although the banks wore down quite a bit over time. A year or so back, they started putting in an RV park on that property, and I thought, well, that’s it, they were finally going to bulldoze it down and fill it in. But no, even though there are dozens of RVs parked around it, the volcano is still there, or at least it was the last time I drove by. And I hope it stays. Not every kid had a volcano practically in his backyard when he was growing up.

Monday Memories: My Home Town

I’m never going to write an autobiography. For one thing, I don’t have the time and energy, and for another, it seems a little pretentious for a hack writer to be doing such a thing. Also, let’s be honest here. I’ve read a lot of books, watched a lot of movies, and spent a lot of time in a room by myself typing. There you go. JAMES REASONER: HIS LIFE AND TIMES. The End.

However, if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know I wax nostalgic from time to time, and in doing so quite a bit lately it occurred to me that I ought to start a series of such posts that are sort of autobiographical in nature. If nothing else, it gets some of my memories down in a bit less transitory form, and they might provide a little entertainment for some of you or make you think back to your own younger years. And of course, one of the great advantages of doing these as blog posts is that you can roll your eyes and skip them and I’ll never know the difference.

I’m going to begin with the picture above. That’s an aerial photo of Azle, Texas, taken in 1938. Now, before you think, “Just how old are you, anyway?”, let me say that my parents didn’t move to Azle until the early Fifties, right after I was born. So that photo predates me by more than a decade. However, some of those buildings were still there when I was growing up in Azle in the Fifties and Sixties, and some of them are still there.

The two-story white building in the lower right portion of the picture? That’s one of the oldest buildings still standing in Azle. I believe it was originally MacDonald’s Grocery Store, and after that it was Stribling’s Drug Store. By the early Sixties, it was Tompkins’ Drug Store. There was a spinner rack of comic books, and I bought a bunch of DENNIS THE MENACE comic books there, along with issues of the DC war comics OUR ARMY AT WAR and OUR FIGHTING FORCES. The Odd Fellows lodge met on the second floor, and around on the side, for a while, there was a small lending library where you could check out books for, I think, ten cents a week.

After the drug store moved to a new strip shopping center at the other end of town (where I bought even more comic books and paperbacks), the building became the home of C&W Electronics, a TV repair shop. Azle had three such shops for a long time: C&W on Main Street downtown, Jimmy Chandler’s out on the Boyd Highway, and my dad’s shop, where he worked out of our house on Hankins Drive. C&W was there for a long time, and after it went out of business the building sat vacant for ages. A few years ago, a For Sale sign went up on it, and I thought, “Crap. Somebody’s going to buy it and tear it down.” They’d already torn down the Red Top Café, just up the street, which dated back to the 1870s and started its existence as a saloon. But no, the building is still there, and these days it’s Red’s Burger House. I go in there to pick up burgers sometimes, and I still know approximately where the comic book spinner rack stood. It’s a good feeling.

Now, diagonally across the street on the corner is a two-story stone building. It was fairly new when that photo was taken in ’38, I believe. A local couple named Jim and Eula Nation built it. I don’t know the original purpose, but in the early Sixties there was a barber shop on the first floor and a snow cone stand on the corner of the parking lot during the summer. I never went to the barber shop (my dad and I got our hair cut at Hukill’s, across the street, in a building that wasn’t there yet in ’38), but I did eat a lot of snow cones from that stand. Then the building was vacant for a while, and in the mid-Sixties, the Azle Public Library, which had gotten started a few years earlier in a small space also across the street, moved in. Mrs. Nation, who still owned the building, was the librarian. I was already working at the library by that time, first as a volunteer and then as a modestly salaried employee (I made enough to buy more comic books and paperbacks!), so I worked there until, I think, 1969. In the mid-Seventies, the library moved into a new building out on the highway, not far from the hospital. The stone building on Main Street is now the Azle Historical Museum, where the original of this aerial photo now hangs, or at least it did the last time I was in there.

See the road that turns off of Main Street next to the museum building and curves up and to the left out of the picture? The second building on the right, the little white house, was still there as recently as a year or two ago, but I believe it was jacked up and moved out. I don’t know where it is now.

Across from that house, on the left side of the road (Church Street), you can see the steeple and part of Azle Christian Church. The building still sits on that property, although in a slightly different place now, and is the church’s Fellowship Hall. Follow Church Street on around, and that clump of trees and cluster of buildings on the left is what was then Azle’s only school. It’s a sprawling stone building famous in these parts as the Rock School. When I went there in the Sixties for sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, it was Azle Junior High. When my daughters attended fifth and sixth grade there, it was Azle Elementary. But whatever its official name, it was and always will be the Rock School.

There are a few other buildings in Azle old enough to have been in this picture that are further out. About half a mile to the south is Ash Creek Baptist Church, where a building that dates from 1898 is now Fellowship Hall. When I was a kid it was still the church’s main building, and that was where I attended the first church services I remember. Livia and I also had our wedding shower in that building. Farther out the same road the church is on is an old house that was built in the 1850s, within a decade after the first settlers moved into the area. When I was a kid, an old log cabin built in the 1840s was still standing on property belonging to the family of a friend of mine. I remember seeing it. I don’t know if it was torn down or fell down, but it’s long gone, like the Red Top up on Main Street. I’m sure there are other private homes in the area that date back that far, but I don’t know the details on all of them.

Since the Sixties, a four-lane highway runs right through the middle of the area in the picture. Most of that farm land you see stretching into the distance? Covered with houses, of course. Things changed a lot during that era, but in the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies, Azle was still a darned good place to live and grow up. One thing about living in one place all your life, every time you go anywhere, you drive right past all those old memories and they come alive again in your mind.

At least they do in mine.

Favorite Bookstores Update: Thompson Book Store

A few years ago I did a series of blog posts about my favorite bookstores. The second one was about Thompson's, which had two locations in downtown Fort Worth over the years. I got a comment on that post this morning letting me know that the surviving location (the other one blew up; the story is in the blog post linked above) has been turned into a bookstore-themed cocktail bar, and a pretty cool-looking one, to boot. The place has a Facebook page, which you can see here. There's a photo of the store the way it looked back in the Seventies, and although I'm not in the picture, I easily could have been. I bought a lot of books there. My bar-hopping days are long since over, but I may have to stop in there sometime just for nostalgia's sake. (In the old picture, if you look along the street next to Thompson's, you can see Barber's Bookstore at the far corner. If you walked from Thompson's to Barber's, turned left, and went another block, you'd be at the Fort Worth Public Library. I spent a lot of time in that end of downtown.)

New Post on Ed Gorman's Blog

I have a new post on Ed Gorman's blog today about the writing of my first novel TEXAS WIND. But as usual when I start waxing nostalgic, I go on about some other stuff, too, including the novel I tried to write before TEXAS WIND. Check it out if you get a chance.

Favorite Reading Spots

Some of you have expressed a tolerance for these nostalgia-laden, semi-autobiographical posts, so here's another one. I think one thing most of us have in common is that we're avid readers and probably always have been. Over the years you've probably had some special spots where you read a lot and have fond memories of them because of that. I've already written about how I enjoyed reading in Study Hall when I was in high school. Here are some other favorite places of mine to crack a book or a comic.

When I was a kid my parents had a low-slung, upholstered rocking chair that was always my favorite place to sit and read. It was next to a window in the living room, so there was good light, and it just seemed to fit me. For most of the years I sat in it, it was covered in some sort of cream-colored naugahyde-like stuff. Next to it was a record cabinet (for those of you who remember records) and when I got back from my weekly trip to the drugstore with the stack of comic books I'd bought, I would sit down in that rocking chair, sort the comics in the order I wanted to read them, saving my favorites for last, and not get up until I'd read through the entire stack.

The same drugstore where I bought my comics also carried a few digest magazines, and I remember reading issues of THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. MAGAZINE in that chair. I could read the entire U.N.C.L.E. novella in the current issue in one sitting, between the time I got home from school and supper (which was always at six o'clock on the dot). Then I'd read the back-up stories the next afternoon. I also recall sitting down in that rocker one Sunday afternoon, after church and Sunday dinner, with the Bantam paperback of THE THOUSAND-HEADED MAN, one of the early Bantam reprints of the Doc Savage novels and the second one I read after METEOR MENACE. Again, I didn't get up until I'd read that entire paperback. I'm thinking I ought to reread it, if I can ever find the time.

One other thing I liked about that rocker: if you rocked hard enough in it, you could tip it over backward. I never got hurt doing that, but my mother hated it. Years later, after I had kids, my mother still had that same chair, and I taught the girls the trick. My mother still hated it. I told her that if she ever got rid of the rocker, I wanted it. Well, she got rid of it, all right, but she wouldn't tell me what she did with it. I suspect she didn't want me to have it because she was afraid the girls would hurt themselves tipping it over. And maybe she was right.

Of course there were other places in my parents' house where I read a lot, including my bed, where I would prop pillows behind me and sit up half the night reading Edgar Rice Burroughs and classic mysteries (John Dickson Carr's THE THREE COFFINS comes to mind, along with a number of Ellery Queen novels) and the summer between eighth and ninth grades, all three Lord of the Rings novels. At some point I got an actual recliner in my room, and that was where I read THE MALTESE FALCON, THE BIG SLEEP, THE MAN FROM DEL RIO, and lots and lots of comic books.

Another of my favorite places to read was a lounge chair on our front porch, as long as the weather was nice, of course. I read more Burroughs there, along with several novels by Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov's THE FOUNDATION TRILOGY (in the fat Science Fiction Book Club omnibus edition that some of you probably remember). I laughed my head off reading Richard S. Prather's Shell Scott novel STRIP FOR MURDER. (Those of you who have read it know the scene that set me off.) I read some mainstream fiction there, too, including a volume of Ben Hecht's short stories, some Irwin Shaw, THE MAGUS by John Fowles, and a book that was a bestseller at the time (forgotten today, of course) THE SECRET OF SANTA VITTORIA.

A couple of doors down the street was a rent house that my parents owned, and for a while my sister and brother-in-law lived there. I hung out there quite a bit and usually had a book with me. It was on the front porch of that house I read Mickey Spillane's ONE LONELY NIGHT. My brother-in-law had a shelf of science fiction novels I raided, so there was still more Burroughs and Heinlein, along with E.E. "Doc" Smith and A.E. van Vogt.

Along in those same years, I spent a lot of time at my aunt's house in the tiny Texas town of Blanket, not far from Brownwood. Some of you know exactly where that is, and no doubt you also know that there's not much to do in Blanket. I had a transistor radio and stacks and stacks of books. I read the great comic novel RHUBARB by H. Allen Smith. I read a bunch of Larry and Streak and Nevada Jim Westerns by "Marshall McCoy", really Len Meares, who became a good friend by correspondence years later. I read the Lancer editions of the Conan stories by Robert E. Howard (complete with the meddling of L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, but I didn't understand that until years later, either). While at the grocery store in Brownwood, I bought copies of FLINT by Louis L'Amour and THE SPY IN THE OINTMENT by Donald E. Westlake. A trip to the drugstore in Comanche, a dozen miles the other direction from Blanket, yielded an issue of THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. digest magazine that featured "The Pillars of Salt Affair", actually written by Bill Pronzini under the Robert Hart Davis house-name. Years later, the one time I met Pronzini, I told him how much I enjoyed reading that story in a big brown armchair in my aunt's house. On a similar note, I recall reading one of Edward S. Aarons' Sam Durrell novels, ASSIGNMENT—SCHOOL FOR SPIES, while I was there. Then, somewhere during that stretch, I met the girl who lived across the street from my aunt and afterwards spent less time reading, but it probably says something about me that I remember all those authors and titles but have absolutely no recollection of her name.

Eventually I went off to college, spending a year at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos (it's now just Texas State) and then finishing my degree at North Texas State University in Denton (now the University of North Texas). At SWTSU I read a bunch of Doc Savage and Nick Carter novels, many of which my roommate borrowed and read as well. I lived in a dorm for one year at NTSU, had an apartment in Denton for a year, and commuted for a year, plus the two summer sessions it took me to finish up. I still read a bunch of comics, and it was along in here that I started reading the Executioner series as well, going through them as fast as I could lay my hands on them. I remember reading a number of Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm novels while I lived in the apartment. While I was commuting, my home-away-from-home became the NTSU library, particularly an isolated corner where a dozen or so study carrels were located behind the stacks where thousands of bound periodicals were shelved. I sat in one of those carrels between classes with food I had snuck in and whatever paperback I was reading, often one of the Jove reprints of a Shadow novel with a cover by Jim Steranko. The library had some of the early trade paperback collections of classic comic strips like DICK TRACY and TERRY AND THE PIRATES, and I'd get those off the shelves and read them as well.

Of course, that area was designed for studying, which I also did . . . very occasionally. It's a wonder I ever made it through college. But hey, when you stop and think about it, I was studying. I just didn't know it.

Later I grew up (sort of), got married, and had daughters who wanted to go to dance class and Girl Scouts. I spent a lot of hours sitting in various vehicles outside of various buildings waiting for them, and of course you know how I passed the time. With pulps, and Dean Koontz novels, and science fiction digests. (I was on my great hiatus from comics by then.) The Girl Scout troops met in the local community center and the parking lot wasn't lit well enough to read by during the winter months when it was dark by the time we'd get there. So I took a little battery-powered light with me and held it over the book with one hand while I turned the pages with the other hand. Sometimes it was cold enough that I had to wear gloves. Sure, I probably could have gone into the building and found some place warm and well-lighted to sit and wait, but I got to where I enjoyed being out there in the car, huddled in a coat, a little island of light in a dark parking lot, just me and my books. I'm sure people thought I was crazy. But I'll bet a few of you understand.

Now I read mostly on the sofa in our living room. As I write this, my Kindle, a trade paperback collection of some Western pulp stories, and a magazine are waiting there beside it for me. Here in my office there's a stack of comics three feet to my left, within reach if I lean over a little between chapters in the current manuscript. To my right is a low bookcase full of research books, but stacked in front of it so that I have to move them occasionally are a couple of stacks of pulp reprints from Black Dog Books and Altus Press and some trade paperback comic book collections. On top of the bookcase is a small stack of library books (a mystery novel and two old Westerns). If I turn my chair around, I'm facing eight sets of metal shelves (four pairs set back to back) completely full of double-stacked paperbacks. On the tops of those shelves are big stacks of hardbacks and trade paperbacks, and there's another set of metal shelves full of hardbacks and trade paperbacks stuck in a corner, along with two six-foot-high stacks of unshelved hardbacks and trade paperbacks. Now, as I look around, I spot a bag of paperbacks I bought at one of the stores down at the coast this past summer that I've never gotten around to putting on the shelves. And this is after losing everything in the fire and starting over less than six years ago. If I never buy another book, I'll never get around to reading all the ones I have.

But what a sad world it would be if I never bought another book. There are bound to be more good reading spots out there, just waiting for me to discover them.

Music 'Til Dawn

Warning: nostalgia ahead.

During the summer of 1966, I lived with my sister. Well, technically I suppose I still lived with my parents, but I spent the whole summer at my sister's house. My brother-in-law was in basic training that summer. I spent it reading and watching TV, mostly old movies and reruns of shows like LEAVE IT TO BEAVER and DOBIE GILLIS. I also wrote the longest piece of fiction I'd done so far, a 40,000 word mystery novel shamelessly in Hardy Boys mode, featuring me and my friends as the detectives. (Long, long since lost, and I wouldn't put it up on Amazon as an e-book even if it wasn't . . . I don't think.) I also wrote a 30,000 word piece of what we'd now call fan fiction, combining two of my interests, the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs and secret agents. That's right, I called it TARZAN: THE MAN FROM A.F.R.I.C.A. (Go ahead and groan. I did.) This one is also long lost.

After those long days of reading paperbacks and comic books, watching TV, and scribbling furiously in spiral notebooks with a fountain pen, every night I listened to an hour or so of a radio show that ran every night on KRLD 1080 AM from 11:30 at night until 5:00 in the morning. It was called "Music 'Til Dawn" and was a nationally syndicated show sponsored by American Airlines. It featured easy listening music, which I already liked even though I was 13 years old. What can I tell you, I was a weird kid. But I think mostly it came from growing up around small-market mixed-format AM radio, so I listened to and liked just about every kind of music.

I really liked the theme song from "Music 'Til Dawn", which I think was played by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra. But I don't know the title of it, and I've never run across anybody else who even remembers the blasted show. Figuring that the entire knowledge of the universe can be found in the blogosphere, I thought I'd ask here. Do any of you (those of a certain age) remember ever hearing American Airlines' "Music 'Til Dawn"? Did I hallucinate it? And if it was real, does anyone recall the name of the theme song? I've searched the Internet for this info with no luck. I'd love to hear the song again nearly fifty years later.

UPDATE: Thanks to Todd Mason for sending me the link to the clip below. I had thought about "That's All", but for some reason that seemed wrong to me. Nice to know that my first instinct was right after all.

Brownwood, The Burma Road, John Wesley Hardin, and The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

Just typing that post title makes me feel a little like Karnak the Magnificent, except that I don't have a punchline for it. Sim-sallah-bim! Oh, by the way, nostalgia ahead, so consider yourself warned.

I mentioned the other day that I went down to Brownwood last week for a family get-together. Here's one of the pictures from that gathering. That's my brother Harold to my left, my sister Norma to my right, my cousin Robert on Harold's other side, and my cousins Pam, Lafreda, and Frances. Sitting in front is my uncle, Fred Reasoner. Fred is the only one of my uncles still living. My aunts have all passed away. While we were eating, Fred told several stories about his service in World War II. He was in the army and drove in truck convoys over the Burma Road from Burma to China, which is some of the most rugged terrain in the world. It's kind of amazing to me that a young man can be sitting at home in Zephyr, Texas, and a few months later be on the other side of the world driving a truck over a road with a cliff on one side and a drop of hundreds of feet on the other, so close that you can't even see the ground when you look out the window. There's a reason they're called the Greatest Generation.

By the way, if you ever find yourself in Brownwood, stop at the Section Hand Steakhouse to eat lunch. Great chicken-fried steak.

Going to and from Brownwood, I drove through the town of Comanche, which means I passed within a block of the place where John Wesley Hardin shot and killed Brown County deputy sheriff Charley Webb. Although accounts vary, I suspect that Webb was there to ambush Hardin, and while you couldn't exactly call the killing self-defense, in this case at least I don't think Hardin was quite as bad as he's sometimes painted. Right there on the corner of the square the old hanging tree still stands, where a mob lynched Hardin's brother Joe and his cousins Bud and Tom Dixson.

The square in Comanche is also where a Rexall drugstore was located in the 1960s, and it was in that drugstore that I bought the issue of THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. digest magazine containing the novella "The Pillars of Salt Affair", which was written by Bill Pronzini under the Robert Hart Davis house-name. Although Pronzini has written much better and much more important novels and stories since then, this U.N.C.L.E. yarn remains my favorite of his work, because I still remember sitting in an old brown armchair in my aunt's house in Blanket and racing through it as fast as I could turn the pages, totally enthralled by the adventure. I've never reread it. I'm not sure I want to. Why take a chance on spoiling such a wonderful memory? One of my great hopes as a writer is that someday something will spark a memory in one of my readers and make them think, "Oh, yeah, I remember reading that book by Reasoner. What a good time that was!"

Such were some of my thoughts driving those Central Texas highways last week.

Bookstore Nostalgia

I was running errands in Fort Worth today and drove along a two-block stretch of Camp Bowie Boulevard where four bookstores used to be located (not all at the same time, although there was some overlap): Fantastic Worlds, which I've written about before on this blog, where I bought a lot of books and comics and made a couple of friends I still have more than 30 years later; Books Etc., the first store to sell copies of my first novel TEXAS WIND (I traded some copies to the owner for some pulps, if I recall correctly); MegaBooks, one of those madhouses of a store where there was practically no organization but where you never knew what you might find if you were willing dig around; and Bricktop Books, which I visited only once but was run by a guy I knew from other used bookstores. Further up Camp Bowie one way was Century Bookstore, where I stopped a few times. Going the other way, out of town, there was a newsstand that was in business for years, where I bought comics and magazines and the occasional paperback, and two more used bookstores that I visited only once or twice, the names of which are gone from my memory. Today you can drive the entire length of Camp Bowie Boulevard, from near downtown to where it turns into Camp Bowie West and peters out between Fort Worth and Weatherford, and I'll bet you can guess how many bookstores you'll find.


That's right. Zero. Time marches on, I guess.

Music: San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair) - Scott McKenzie

I heard this song on the radio earlier today, and while I don't think it's a great song (and didn't think so back when it was new, either), it did trigger a lot of memories. And since (consider yourself warned) I'll seize any excuse to wallow in nostalgia . . .

I spent most of the summer of 1967 in the tiny town of Blanket, Texas, about halfway between Comanche and Brownwood, for those of you familiar with the area. My widowed aunt lived there, and my grandmother, who was in poor health, lived with her. My mother went down there to help out, and I went along.

I never went anywhere and stayed without taking a big stack of paperbacks with me. Since there really wasn't a whole lot I could do to help with the situation, I spent a lot of time with my nose in a book, as people used to say. I can't remember everything I read, of course, but I do recall reading RHUBARB by H. Allen Smith, the story of a cat who owned a baseball team (hilarious stuff); some of the Lancer editions of Robert E. Howard's stories (and I knew even then that pure Howard, or what passed for it at the time, was better than the stuff DeCamp and Carter monkeyed with); various "Nevada Jim" and "Larry and Streak" Westerns by "Marshall McCoy" (never dreaming, of course, that twenty years later I'd be friends with Len Meares, the guy who actually wrote them); a great Man From U.N.C.L.E. story in the digest magazine, "The Pillars of Salt Affair" by "Robert Hart Davis" (actually Bill Pronzini, and years later I was able to tell him in person how much I enjoyed it); half a dozen Sam Durrell espionage novels by Edward S. Aarons; and some hardboiled private eye yarns by Thomas B. Dewey featuring Mac, his most well-known character (Dewey lived out the last years of his life in Brady, Texas, about sixty miles from where I was reading those novels). Also, my aunt subscribed to THE SATURDAY EVENING POST and had stacks and stacks of them going back years, and I went through all of them reading the short stories that looked interesting, scores of them, I imagine, although I can't remember a single one now.

I listened to the radio a lot, too – KBWD-AM out of Brownwood – and Scott McKenzie's "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)" was on there all the time that summer, along with "I Dig Rock 'n' Roll Music" by Peter, Paul, and Mary and "Light My Fire" by the Doors" (much better songs, both of them). And I hung out with the girl who lived across the street, who seemed impressed by a guy from the big city (trust me, compared to Blanket, Azle was a big city). It's driving me crazy that I can't recall her name, even though I can close my eyes and remember what she looked like. But I never saw her again after that summer, of course, so I guess it's not too surprising that her name eludes me. She probably doesn't remember me, either.

That was my summer of '67. Nothing spectacular, by any means, but the memories are good ones, and the influences of some of the books I read still echo 45 years later.

Spinner Racks

Hey, kids!  Comics!  (That'll bring back memories for some of you.  See the discussion of spinner racks in the comments on the previous post.)

Another Picture From Way Back When

I think this must have been taken around Christmas 1975 before we were married.  I know it's in the living room of the house where her parents lived then.  I can barely remember being that young.