Renegade by Styx

Miracles by Jefferson Starship
It was another Sunday after church running errands at Deerbrook Mall. It was just after Christmas, in fact – it was after my birthday. While Aunt Joyce and Uncle walked around Venture, Dave, Jim, John and I would go into the mall. My favorite places in the mall were Musicland and Waldenbooks. But this particular afternoon I was camped out at Musicland.

John and I were now in high school and I was beginning to get serious about music. While we were only a freshman, between my brother Dave and my cousins, we had collected a fair amount of 45’s. Last year we had started getting Albums and 8-tracks. For our birthdays, my brother Lee had given me the ‘blue’ Beatles Greatest Hits and Dave the ‘red’ Beatles Greatest Hits. By now between Dave and I, had 10 or 11 albums and almost a hundred 45’s.

My cousin Keith would eventually give me Wild Cherry’s album, the one with “Play That Funky Music.” He gave John Ted Nugent’s ‘Free For All’. I always thought he had given us the wrong albums. John was much more into Disco than I was. I would eventually go on to join Steve Dahl’s Insane Coho Lips Anti-Disco group. But Keith probably remembered John had Kiss albums – the ‘Originals, “Destroyer” and “Rock ‘n’ Roll Over” – which I had borrowed from him for a couple of weeks. Until we got into a fight and he demanded I returned his albums. I didn’t want them anyways. There were a bunch of losers, in their make-up and cool larger-than-life stage outfits. Yea, who needed Kiss. I had just gone back to my Beach Boys – though I was beginning to think maybe the Beach Boys weren’t as cool as I thought they were.

My musical tastes were beginning to open up. Last Christmas Lee had gotten me Blue Oyster Cult’s Specter album. They created the interest to get into Kiss in the first place. John had actually gone on a date – with a girl – to a Kiss concert. I was drawing their faces in junior high. The fight between John and I killed my interest in Kiss, they were stupid anyways. When Blue Oyster Cult released ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ that summer, Kiss was just a kid’s band. Ignore the fact that they were topping the charts and doing TV specials. The fact remained, my musical tastes were expanding. 

While that particular day we were still doing our after-church trips to Deerbrook Mall, we were not doing them as frequently. Our family routines were beginning to change. For example, one big change was that Turnstyle had gone out of business and a new department store named Venture had moved in. We were also allowed to roam the mall for the next hour has long as we met Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack back at checkouts at the prescribed time. 

As we entered the mall from Venture, Musicland was our first stop. While all of us entered pass the red-bricked walls of the store, I was always a sucker for the featured albums on the endcaps of the record bins. Dave, Jim and John quickly looked at those then moved further into the store to look at the musical instruments and stereo equipment. After reviewing the end caps for sale items I would begin at the beginning of the alphabet begin looking at the various albums in the record bin. I would typically start by flipping through all The Beach Boys albums – they sure had a lot of albums.

However, that day was a little different. It was mid-January and I had gotten clearance from The Tower – Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack – to spend money on an album. The money had come by way of birthday cards – most likely Grandma, Grandma Zilligen and Aunt Ida. So I wasn’t just looking – I was purchasing. I could almost smell the smoke from the twenty dollars in my wallet. There were so many bands I knew nothing about. There were so many albums I knew nothing about. I was just beginning to learn how much music there was to discover. The scent of ash, soot and burnt polyester was strong. 

In the late ’70s, the Disco Rage was beginning to shows signs of dissent (or the Disco Inferno was beginning to cool). There was also the release of Grease – spurred on by America’s infatuation with ‘Happy Days’, the old days, the 50’s. So there was this weird conflict of new, modern dance music with oldies from when rock n roll started. The death of Elvis Presley in ’77 also didn’t hurt. So when Elvis died, my family embraced his music. So the whole family was into the Elvis Greatest Hit 8 track that Uncle Jack had bought for the station wagon. I found his music old and boring. On the other side, I was not into new dance disco sound. But to be perfectly honest, I merely feigned my opposition to Elvis’ music. This fulfilled my need to be a rebellious teenager. 

This feeling would best be captured in Bruce Springsteen’s lyric from ‘Growin’ Up’: “when they said, Sit down, I stood up”. So I stood up. I would not be listening to Elvis just because the King had died. I would not join others under the Disco ball. I was not going along with what everyone else was doing. When Lee gave me Blue Oyster Cult’s ‘Spectre’ album I found a much edgier sound. I also enjoyed Uncle Jack’s grimace or Aunt Joyce’s crossed eyebrows when I played the album. I always thought their tolerance for my volume was lower when I was playing ‘Spectres’ than the others’ most acceptable Elvis or pop songs. It was the same reaction John got for his Kiss albums. Of course, I could play my Beach Boys without the Volume Police being on patrol. 

At this point, I had decided not to get any more 8 track tapes. Lee had talked about a new format – the cassette tape – that was better than 8 tracks. It was like a mini reel-to-reel. It’s not that cassette tapes were new – I remember Mom had one we could record on. In fact, I would set up a cassette recorder in our bedroom New Year’s Eve to record the WLS Top 100 Songs of the year. I would warn everyone not to enter the room because I did not want them to disturb the sensitive recording studio I had set up. My ‘studio’ consisted of flipping my AM radio on top of the cassette recorder. Ah, those cherished recordings that despite spending hours to record them, I never actually listened to them. 

Cassettes had moved into prerecord music and entered the automobile market. This spelled the end of the 8 track tape. But adding a cassette player/recorder to our home system was not an option for Dave and I. The stereo Grandma had gotten us had a builtin 8 track player. John and Jim’s stereo had a separate 8 track player so they could get a cassette player to attach to their stereo. David and I were stuck on 8 tracks until we got a new stereo. So I was switching to vinyl. 

That Sunday morning, as I wandered around Musicland, I struggled with trying to figure out what I wanted. I had already collected a number of Beach Boys tapes so I wasn’t really interested in another one of their albums. I wanted something new like Blue Oyster Cult. I was still learning about music and who sang what songs. Dave had gotten Fleetwood Mac ‘Rumor’ album on 8 track. It was a great album. I remember first hearing parts of the album in high school when we had gym class and the pom-pom squad was practicing a routine to ‘Don’t Stop’. And when they were done practicing they let the album continue through to ‘Go Your Own Way’ and ‘Songbird’. 

But while I liked Fleetwood Mac, Dave had ‘Rumors’, it wouldn’t make sense for me to buy a Fleetwood Mac album – Dave had already ‘claimed’ that band. I liked Steve Miller but I wasn’t sure about the other songs. I continued flipping through the albums but I was beginning to feel I was running out of time. Dave, Jim and John had long continued on to other stores. I was reviewing the albums Musicland had chosen to market to casual mall patrons for the 3rd or 4th time.

“Hey Trike,” Dave called from the mall. “We’ve got to meet Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack in Venture.”

The final moments were now at hand. A decision was needed. I picked up Styx’s Pieces of Eight, which was on my ‘For Sure’ list. Once again I was drawn to the shiny gold cover of the Jefferson Starship ‘Gold’ album. You could actually feel the raised letter of the album. With “Pieces of Eight” already in my hands, it was easy for the kid working at the store to talk me into the shiny new album with the raised lettering.

“That’s their greatest hits, ” he said.

Sold! I just needed an excuse. Time was short and my window was closing. I’m pretty sure a blister forming on my rear right cheek through my wallet. I grabbed the album from the holder and brought both up to the store counter. While I knew the total was going to be a little over $12 dollars, I still continued to misjudge how much the tax would be.

Shoving the change in my pocket, I grabbed my bagged albums and raced from the store into the mall which was just outside of Venture. Passing the checkout counters set up for the Venture partons that were going into the mall, ignoring any potential glances that may have been given on my potential risk of shoplifting with an open Musicland bag.

By the time I made it to the regular checkout counters, John, Jim and Dave were neatly stacked behind Aunt Joyce while Uncle Jack did not look happy.

“Did you forget your watch?” he sarcastically asked as he countered out his bills to the cashier for Aunt Joyce’s purchases.

“No…,” I started.

But Aunt Joyce asked if we were ready with the bagged purchases into the shopping cart thus saving me from further questions. We all escorted Aunt Joyce to the station wagon. We piled into the station wagon, John and I opting for the back seat.

That is the rear-facing back seat of the station wagon. This was well before any seat belt laws. While the station wagon had seat belts they were all neatly tucked away and unreachable. We never feared for our lives. John was complaining that he (and I) were too big to be sitting in the back seat. The current process was ‘taking turns’. Those who sat in the ‘way back’, as the rear-facing seat was referred to, on the way there (where ever we were going) would get to sit in the regular back seats on the way back. But this wasn’t fair for those two stop trips – such as our mall trips after church. John was voicing his displeasure in this system.

When we got home, we would get out of our Sunday clothes and get into our ‘play clothes’ which consisted of jeans and a t-shirt. Sunday dinner was typically our bigger meal, like supper. Ever since Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack had the porch enclosed and insulated we had a kitchen table added so we could all sit around the table together. The fact was John was right, we were getting too big. As ‘us boys’ were continued to grow and we could no longer fit two boys to a bench around the old kitchen table.

This particular meal was longer then I wanted. As soon as appropriate I asked to be excused. This was the rule at our meals. We would say grace, have our meal and  we would need to ask if we could ‘be excused’ from the table. This would give Aunt Joyce or Uncle Jack a chance to check our plates for food that could be sent to the African Children. All through the entire meal, I couldn’t wait to get to my bedroom so I could listen to my new purchases. With permission granted from Uncle Jack, I brought my dishes to the sink and stole away to my bedroom.

Both albums were gatefold which meant after the plastic was removed the album would open to reveal additional album artwork. One side would contain the album, the other side would typically be glued shut. The Styx album revealed the band members bust as Easter Island heads. I pulled the album out and saw the band included the lyrics on the liner sleeve. Including the lyrics would become an important feature to me. I removed our stereo’s dust cover and set up my first listen to side one of Styx’s ‘Pieces of Eight’. Dropping the tonearm on the groove of side one I stretched out on my bed with the inner sleeve in hand.

Looking over the sleeve, an announcer began to ask for my attention. It was Dennis DeYoung beginning “Great White Hope”. I followed all the lyrics to “I’m Ok”. I knew “Sing for the Day”, which I only thought was only OK. Waiting for “The Message” to finish I was eagerly anticipating “Lords of the Ring” having read “The Hobbit” and halfway through “The Fellowship of the Ring”. During “The Message” I skimmed the lyrics and saw no mention of Frodo, Gollum or any characters from Lord of the Rings. “Lords of the Ring” concluded and I swing my legs off the bed to flip the album.

I was looking forward to “Blue Collar Man,” John already had the 45 and was another reason I wanted this album. I tipped the volume knob ever so slightly up to give our single speaker boxes as much help as possible but not draw the attention of the Volume Police. Keyboards rattled the speakers on their shelves. During the second chorus, Aunt Joyce’s head popped through the door.

“Trike!” she yelled above Dennis DeYoung’s keyboard, “Turn it down!”

I immediately grabbed the volume and turned it noticeably lower. I swore that I would always be told to lower my music before John had to. But as while I was wallowing about my unjustice, I was missing Dennis explain what it was to be a blue-collar man.

I spent “Queen of Spades” going back and forth on how unfair I was being treated by Aunt Joyce and how lucky I was to be living with them. At sixteen years old – the sour grapes were winning. I eventually returned to the liner sleeve and the lyrics of “Queen of Spades.” When “Renegade” started with its acapella beginning, I was entranced. When the entire band kicked in behind Tommy Shaw’s yell I got chills. The jig was up and I that emotional high I wanted to repeat over and over. That discovery of a new song that I could connect to. But it wasn’t just the shivers down my spine. That was just part of it.

The other part was when John began knocking on my door. “Who is that?” he asked. He had heard the song on the radio. I proudly turned over the Pieces of Eight album and we stood listening to Tommy Shaw, Dennis DeYoung and the rest of the band finish the song.

“Can I borrow this?” John asked.

“When I’m finished,” I replied. Jeez, I thought, let me finish the album.

“Yea, Yea, Yea,” John replied waving off the album cover. “Yea, when you’re done.”

The album finished the finale “Pieces of Eight” and then the forgettable “Aku-Aku”. I brought the album over to John’s room. The emotional connection to ‘Renegade’ was key but having the song that connected with other people also became important. I returned to my room for my next album.

Jefferson Starship’s “Gold” did not have the same impact as “Pieces of Eight”. While the gatefold cover revealed their past albums the songs were not as exciting. Through “Miracles” I thought I remembered hearing it on the radio in the car with my parents. Or it may have been wishful thinking. The songs were polished and they were all good; not as uneven as “Pieces of Eight”. But you would expect that from a greatest hits album.

I was curious about what was on the other albums: “Dragon Fly”, “Red Octopus”, “Spitfire” (l loved the cover with the dragon) and “Earth”. I was intrigued with raised ‘punch printed’ album cover of “Gold”. I kept running my fingers over the raised letters and ridges of the front cover. The inner sleeve did not provide any lyrics, just a bland generic paper sleeve. The next 47 minutes and 38 seconds I got to know Jefferson Starship. As I listened I grew more curious about their past albums, a curiosity I would never explore. But I did become a fan which would be reinforced with their next album release “Freedom at Point Zero”.

This binge of album purchases set me up for a lifetime hobby. One that would take me to dozens of record stores in the Chicagoland area. It set me up on how I would purchase records in the future. My album collection would grow based on my quest for a song or artist that other people would eventually come to be impressed with. And like the general public, when that song or artist became too popular sometimes my interest would wane. I would also continue to be a sucker for gimmickry album covers and marketing strategies, always curious about what the music on the vinyl inside sounded like.

I would so begin to purchase multiple albums at the same time. Spending $20 on records would turn into $40 and $50 at a time bring home 4, 5 or 7 albums at a time. Eventually, Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack would tell me I couldn’t spend all my money on records. So I would have to sneak my new purchases into the house. Occasionally they would notice my growing record collection and I would have to go months without my new hobby.

Collecting albums became a lifetime and a defining trait of myself. I don’t think it would be going too far to say it a defining part of who I am as a person. Music became a connecting point for me to others. My best friends, who would later be defined at Greg and Jeff, would also have strong music interests. I knew people who when they talked about me would know music was a big part of my life. Obsessive? probably but I still understood music was only one part of many that make me who I was and who I would become.

Collecting albums was a critical part of my music interest. While I would like to say that actual music was more important, both aspects actually went hand in hand. Having knowledge was key but I had a long way to go in that department. My sources would be my friends, the radio, the record stores I would visit, the occasional magazine and the library. One of my favorite sources were the music charts. While many radio stations had their own charts, the king of the charts was the Billboard. While this didn’t actually provide any musical knowledge this was how I would determine where to begin my exploration. This gave my music tastes a very pop-orientation though I was very willing to experiment. I also never had a ‘rebel’ attitude – liking something because other people didn’t like it – despite my initial aversion to Elvis and Disco. I was looking for an understanding of my life in the music l was listening to as I laid on my bed. Lyrics were very important. To me, “lyrics could save a song.” While I loved melodies and especially the hooks, simple lyrics or cool concepts with a simple melody would win me over every time.

The real problem with my new album collecting hobby was money. Us boys made money by delivering newspapers. I don’t remember the name of the newspaper, but it was a weekly newspaper that we delivered on Thursday. Initially, we could only take this job as long as we didn’t need to collect any money from the customers. However, within a few months, we were required to collect money for subscriptions. This actually turned out to be fortunatus.  As we went from house to house we found out a lot of people who didn’t want the paper we were delivering in the first place. In fact, they were very clear that we were NOT to leave any more papers on their doorsteps. We ended up dropping about 80% of our deliveries. This made our routes much easier. The newspaper, however, still dropped off the same amount of papers each week. These extra papers would build up in the garage. So every few weeks, Uncle Jack and a couple of us boys would sell the papers to a scrap yard.

These Saturday morning trips to the scrap yard began a fond routine with Uncle Jack. I had already realized Uncle Jack didn’t take the shortest routes to where he was going. He could have taken to the tollway and the whole trip would have taken 15 minutes. But that would have cost 25 cents each way. Years later I would realize he could have taken Waukegan road, the main road that took one North, to save the 25 cents but he didn’t take that route either.

Prior to those morning drives, ‘the boys’ would daisy-chain handing bundles of papers to each other filling up the back of the station wagon. There were typically so many we would have to put the back seats down to fit them all. Many times we would do this the night before and the station wagon would be backed in ready for its early departure. We would typically leave between 7 to 8 am. Being an early riser so I would almost always accompany Uncle Jack on these morning runs.

The route to the scrapyard was comfortable – peaceful, quiet. It was as close to a country drive as you could do in the Northern suburbs of Chicago. From Wilmot Road, Uncle Jack would turn left on to Duffy Lane, a quiet road with regular houses on bigger lots. We would typically not see another car that early in the morning. When Duffy would dead end, he would take a right onto Riverwoods Road.

As the ride with Uncle Jack continued the houses got more expensive and moved up in their lots. These houses looked more like our houses around the lake where we lived. When we crossed Route 22 (this is the road that took us to my brother Lee’s house in Lake Zurich) we were starting to get out of our ‘normal’ routes though we could still be going to Hawthorn, the mall in Vernon Hills. But these mornings Uncle Jack continued straight on Riverwoods Road instead of taking a left on Everett Road. From here we were on less-traveled roads. I would rarely ever take this route even when I could drive. Uncle Jack only took this route when we were dropping off the papers at the scrap yard. 

The houses now all but disappeared into their lots leaving the people that lived in them an idle curiosity. The avoided tollway appeared on our right and the early morning truck drivers would break our morning calm. The drive was calm. There wasn’t a lot of talking, just the radio. I would typically have my nose into one of my books. When Riverwoods Road steered us more eastward, we lost sight and sound of the tollway and back to our radio. Soon we would have to stop at Route 60 at stop signs that would eventually be changed to stoplights and continue our journey north.

Once on the other side of Route 60, the lots now just changed to plain fields with no houses at all. But the fields eventually gave way to big mowed lawns of expensive homes of fancy subdivisions. Out of nowhere, we were suddenly flying over the tollway on a bridge. A field and a church gave way to more fields. After a few company buildings and a railroad, the homes were gone for good which meant we were coming into ‘town’ and we were almost at the scrap yard. At the stop sign, we now took a right and there were only business buildings on Route 176.

It was a quarter-mile drive, just before the railroad tracks, when we arrived at Rondout Iron & Metal. It was an oily dirty junkyard. It didn’t smell like a dump, it smelled mechanical. The station wagon would waddle through the uneven gravel to the scale by the office. We would be weighed and then motioned onward to the loading dock. I and whoever was with would run to the back and open the station wagon’s back door. There would be one or two young men on the loading dock who we would toss the newspaper bundles to. I say toss but sometimes we would struggle through it seemed each trip it would get easier. Once the station wagon was unloaded we would be weighed again. Uncle Jack would then pull off the scale go inside to collect our money. The early morning sun would try but it never dried the oil and mud of the junkyard. The station wagon would waddle out of the yard as Uncle Jack navigated the potholes to take us home, the sun a little higher, the shadows a little shorter.

Uncle Jack loved to take these routes. GPS’s call them alternate routes. Google Maps call them scenic routes. In a few years, I would learn that Supertramp called them ‘The Long Way Home’. He would take them through Riverwoods when we would go to Wheeling. Or through Lake Forest when he would come back from his Saturday Morning banking trips. If we went with on his banking trip, we would marvel at all the big expensive houses he would pass as he drove through Lake Forest. Sometimes he would comment about Mr. So-So who works at Blah Blah Important Company lives on this street and I would imagine butlers and maids scurrying around large rooms and big backyard patios. Over the years I would wonder why they would need such big houses. And those displays of wealth would leave a bad taste in my mouth, or rather a canker sore. I believe it was Krokus who said ‘Eat the Rich.’

Years later through a few series of friends of friends, I would DJ a small private party in one of those houses. They did not have butlers or maids but they did have people serving their catered food. I set up in a corner of their living room – pass their life-sized cabbage patch dolls that would be seated in the hallway to the kitchen area. Above their large fireplace, they proudly displayed the largest spin-art I’d ever seen. I did not hold the same of affection or respect for the signs wealth that my friends did, particularly Ralf. While Uncle Jack would sometimes fall into the racial profile of Jews and money, he had a strong respect for money and the people who accumulated it.

When we finally arrived home from our trip to the scrapyard, or sometime it would happen after Uncle Jack did his Saturday morning banking, we would gather around the kitchen table. Ceremoniously Uncle Jack would display the total take from the scrapyard paper money, show his division by four, include our allowance and neatly lay out the bills and coins into four equal piles. We would greedily swipe the bills and coins into our hands and scurry back to our bedrooms like bridge trolls. But we would dutifully drop our pennies in our pennies jugs. I drop any nickels I had in the jar I used to collect my nickels in. I miss those young huddled morning ceremonies and I think Uncle Jack enjoyed the attention from his four little bridge trolls. But more than anything I miss those long scenic drives the Northern Chicago suburbs with Uncle Jack. Uncle Jack would continue his drives without us and would spontaneously show up at our homes to drop off food items or little things for the grandkids. I know he loved stopping by but I also suspected he loved taking the long way home. Its a trait he’s passed to me when I can afford the time.

So from delivering the wanted papers and selling the unwanted papers each of us would make about $10 a week. They say to get a job you have to have a job. This would be true in high school because soon I would be getting a new job – a regular job at Deerfield Tennis Courts where I could make that is 2 nights! So my first real job I was making $1.95 an hour.

But like any kid – my ‘wants’ were always more than my budget. And now my ‘wants’ were in the form of flat black vinyl discs. I would buy what I could get into the house, and if I got caught, I would be banned from future purchases. This meant I would just have to be very careful when I brought albums into the house the next time. While getting the albums to my bedroom could be tough, what albums I should actually purchase was getting tougher. There were so many choices. These two albums, Styx’s ‘Pieces of Eight’ and Jefferson Starship’s ‘Gold’ represented two key ways I would make my purchase decisions.

First, album covers would always be part of my decision-making process (and eventually cd’s). The embossed, raised printing of the Jefferson Starship album was a big factor in that purchase. I was subject to gimmicks and cool artwork when it came to my album purchases. So over the next months, I would purchase Meatloaf’s ‘Bat Out of Hell’, Molly Hatchet and Gamma’s debut albums simply because of their covers. I had no idea how the music sounded. And while I knew AC/DC did that “Highway to Hell” song, it was subtle inclusion the devil tail drawn in on the cover that sealed that purchase.

And while the cover was important, many times just the fact that it was a new release was just as important. This led to the purchase of Queen’s ‘Jazz’, Eric Clapton’s ‘Backless’, Bad Company’s ‘Desolation Angels’, Cheap Trick’s ‘At Budokan’, Jethro Tull’s ‘Stormwatch’ and The Eagle’s ‘The Long Run’.

But I was collecting – so when one of ‘my bands’ released new album, that was a required purchase. When Blue Oyster Cult (BOC) released ‘Mirrors’, that was an easy decision. Lee had given me BOC’s ‘Specters’ a few years ago, then I picked up their ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ album on an 8 track. I was collecting Blue Oyster Cult. I had decided to purchase everything on vinyl, no more 8 tracks. So when Styx’s released ‘Cornerstone’, I bought it. When Jefferson Starship released ‘Freedom Point Zero’, I bought it.

I also viewed each of ‘us boys’ as ‘collecting’ bands or artists. So I couldn’t buy someone else’s band. So Dave was buying Fleetwood Mac’s albums so I couldn’t buy ‘Rumours’ or ‘Tusk’. John was collecting ELO so I couldn’t buy ‘Discovery’, even though Dave had ‘Out of the Blue’. Jim never really collected albums, he never really got past 45’s. There was literally a whole world of music waiting to be explored – as long as I didn’t start collecting someone else’s band.

To find my music I relied on my friends, mainly Greg and Jeff, along with a neighbor friend Todd Combs. In high school, I had switched radio stations from WLS to The Loop led by morning DJ Steve Dahl. And of course my local record stores. I would soon outgrow the Deerfield Record Shop (sorry, Lenny!) and switch to Laurie’s which had opened up in the Deerfield Commons. These recommendations included Rush’s ‘Permanent Waves’, J. Geils Band’s ‘Love Stinks’, UFO’s “No Place To Run”, Bob Seger’s “Against The Wind”, Journey’s “Departure” and Genesis’ “Duke”.

Over the next several years, I would average 30 to 40 albums purchases a year. While I would continue to succumb to the allure of great artwork and would crave the latest releases, I was also learning about key albums and artists I had missed. Not too unlike the charts I was following of albums I would mentally rank the classic bands and artists. Led Zepplin, The Who, Pink Floyd, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, that list would forever be growing.

Lee had given Dave and I the two Beatles Greatest Hits albums, The Red and The Blue albums as they were known as. For my Beatles collection, this would suffice for the time being. But as I would reach out to a particular artist, I would need to decide to purchase the greatest hits or a ‘classic album’ of their catalog. For example, I had been integrated by the fact that “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin had never been released as a single. So one of my first ventures into the past was the purchase of Led Zeppelin’s “IV” (or ZoSo, Runes, Fourth as it would be called). Originally released in 1971, it seemed strange to listen to such old music like the Beach Boys but Led Zeppelin was still cool.

I knew by this age that what I told my friends I was listening to mattered. I was too socially unstable to get away with telling them I still liked the Beach Boys. Journey, AC/DC, Genesis and Rush ruled the schools now. While I still purchased Beach Boys’ albums I would not share this fact with my friends. It would be years before we all matured enough to allow each of us to go outside the imaginary peer boundaries we had set up for ourselves and each other.

I began to search and explore all the music I was exposed to. And with the demands of school, family, friends and work I had to decide how to spend my listening time. I would soon be driving so control over the radio would offer more time – when friends were not in the car. A boombox would allow me to bring my music with me but would present other problems. Until I got my own car and installed a cassette player I would have The Loop 98.7 to guide me at the end of the seventies and into the next decade.

And while my friends and family would guide my musical tastes, I would eventually outpace them in my musical knowledge and thirst for more. But for now, we were turning each other on to the music. We were discovering the music of the late seventies, though from our skewed youthful perspectives.

Disco was beginning to die, punk was being discovered, the keyboards for New Wave were only then being set up, Heavy Metal was retooling and Southern Rock had seen its high noon. We would not have the anthems of war or protests, so our view of past music was more romantic and naive. Our view of older music was based on what our radio stations and older siblings played for us. Resources were finite, time was finite and I had to choose between discovery and depth. I would make choices based on album covers and many times what the latest releases were. I devoted a lot of money to music – always to toward the media and less on the equipment or concerts. A hobby was born that would shape my next forty years.

Ah – Zilligen Christmas! After 40 years it is still a peak of the holiday season for me. The fact that we had Zilligen Christmas wasn’t so great. After our parents died I no longer lived with my brother Lee and my sisters. Dave and I were the exceptions. However, the Brumm families we were now living with made a point of getting us together as often as possible.

For four or five years in high school the Beckmans, who Dave and I lived with, would spend a week with the Steins, who Dawn lived with. This week was spent at Twin Pines Resort just outside of Ludington Michigan. The Beckmans and Steins each rented a cottage for the week which allowed Dave and me to spend a week with our sister. There were also a number of Columbus Day weekends when the Beckman and Steins would gather together again at Twin Pines to snag salmon that would run in the State Park a few miles away.

Different Brumm families would also host Fourth of July parties, or Memorial Day or Labor Day weekend parties. And we would also see each at the annual Brumm Picnic. And for each of us, there would soon be graduation and confirmation parties. Despite their best efforts, there were still some holidays we would still miss sharing together: with Easter, Halloween and Thanksgiving we would take up our new families’ traditions.

Christmas was another story.  Like many families, getting together for Christmas can be difficult, particularly the families with members who are hours away. Many times this would result in a second or third Christmas when arrangements could be made to gather with the ones you love. My mom’s family had also been split up when my grandmother passed away when they were children. Their effort to gather together during Christmas became the Brumm Christmas Party. The Brumm siblings and their spouses would gather at one of their homes to celebrate Christmas. When I was younger, this would result in a gift from my godparents the next morning. My godparents just happened to be Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack, who Dave and I now lived with.

With this history in my mom’s past, it is not surprising that the same arrangements were made for us. So that first year after our parent had died, during our Christmas Break, we all gathered at Aunt Bernice and Uncle Ray’s house. It was just us Zilligens – and Aunt Bernice. I don’t remember Uncle Ray being there. While he was a custodian at Hersey High School in Wheeling, he was likely working while the kids were on break.

Each of us were dropped off by the aunt or uncle of the families we were now living with. This was so different than the year earlier. My family’s Christmas tradition was to go our Grandma and Grandpa Brumm’s house on Christmas Eve. Our Dad would feign some illness and have to stay behind. When we returned, Dad would remark how Santa had come by evidence of all the Christmas presents under the tree.

In the last Christmas with my parents, they were going through a divorce. Mom had a restraining order on Dad so there was no one to put out the Christmas presents that year. So that Christmas Eve, when it was time to put the presents under the tree, Mom decided Dawn was old enough to know that there was no Santa Claus. The fact was Dawn had known for a couple of years already. She was part of the Lookout Team while Dave and I jumped into window wells of our neighbor’s house to spy their basement to see if we could see our presents we thought our parents were hiding there. Yea, Dawn knows all about Santa Claus.

So last year on Christmas Eve Mom decided that we would put our own presents under the tree. Mom wasn’t hiding the presents as she had in the past. They were simply stacked on the top shelf of the closet in her bedroom. They were all wrapped in newspaper. It was a clear sign that there wasn’t a lot of money to be spent, particularly on Christmas wrapping paper. One by one we each walked from Mom’s closet and put the presents under the tree. Then we all pretended not to care about opening them. It was hard without Dad being around but never estimate the power of shiny new things to distract a child.

Some time that late afternoon or early evening Mom gave us permission to open our presents. I honestly don’t remember much of that last Christmas with my Mom. Outside of putting the presents out and them being wrapped in newspaper. It was a quiet evening of gift-giving and sharing time with our mom and each other, now overshadowed as our last Christmas together.

So a year later we now gathered at Aunt Bernice and Uncle Ray’s house to begin a new tradition. We put the gifts we had gotten for each other around Aunt Bernice’s Christmas tree in their family room. Aunt Bernice had made us lunch and we sat her table talked about our new schools, new bedrooms and scooped about the cousins we were now living with.

Once we finished lunch, it was time for the ‘Main Event’ – the present opening. While I was very excited to get new gifts I was also excited to see how my brother and sisters would like what I had gotten them. It was an unmistakable sign of maturity I did not appreciate at the time. Lee’s gifts to us were all identical. Four wrapped squares two-foot or so by a foot and a half. We all knew they were paintings. Lee had painted each of us a picture on a cardboard canvas with a reddish wooden frame. I receive a blue Triceratops (which is currently hanging in Nate and Noah’s bedroom). Dave received a collie. Each of our paintings hung over our beds while we lived at Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack’s house. Lee painted Dawn a panda and Hope a poodle, probably after our family dog Jamie she took with when she moved in with Aunt Bev and Uncle Dick.

I remembered Hope had gotten me the Stephen King paperback ‘box set’ so I could continue reading my ghost stories. It contained his first three novels – ‘Carrie’, ‘Salem’s Lot’ and ‘The Shining’. I remember this because when her daughters were in junior high I threatened Hope that I would get my nieces Stephen King novels for Christmas. But Hope said they were too young for Stephan King. The view from adult-to-child is so different than child-to-child.

I don’t remember what Dawn had gotten me (sorry Dawn!). Dave and I did not exchange gifts since we were living together. This did not stop us from trying to convince Aunt Joyce we should still get each other presents. She was not persuaded. After all, we were not the ones paying for the gifts.

As the excitement of new gifts faded, Aunt Bernice introduced us to a new game which has become an essential part of the Zilligen Christmas tradition – ‘Take Away Bunko’. First, she had us organize our presents that we had just received from each other. She then instructed us to sit in a circle in the middle of her living room. She left then returned carrying a large plastic bag. She overturned the bag and out tumbled neatly wrapped Christmas presents. She left again this time returning with a pie tin with a pair of dice in them.

“Now,” she explained, “Dawn will start because she is the youngest. She will roll the dice. If she gets doubles, she gets to pick a present from the pile.”

Unfortunately, when Dawn rolled the dice she didn’t get doubles.

“Now pass the pan to Lee and he gets to roll. You keep rolling the dice until all the presents are gone.”

So we excitedly rolled the dice each hoping for a double. The pressure mounted as the pile of presents got smaller. Each double rolled was getting more and more important. Aunt Bernice laughed and yell with us as until the last present was taken. Dave was clearly disappointed because he didn’t any presents. I, on the other hand, had done quite well. We all looked to Aunt Bernice like dogs who were balancing treats on their noses – except for Dave who looked close to tears.

“Now,” Aunt Bernice instructions continued, “you keep rolling the dice and when you get doubles, you get to steal a present from someone else!”

Dave’s eyes lit with vindication.

Setting her bread timer on the end table next to us she said, “I’m going to set the timer for 5 minutes. So you can keep rolling until the timer goes off.”

Dave still had a chance to get some presents. What I didn’t realize was I was likely to lose my newly won presents. Now as we rolled the dice the excited yells turned to shrills of delight and groans of agony.  Dave would eventually get a present and would go onto a string of doubles accumulating a nice pile of presents. My pile, on the other hand, had grown dangerously low.

The five of us continued to roll the dice with each double drawing more and more excitement. Aunt Bernice would come back and forth from the kitchen checking on our progress. We grew desperate as the timer entered the last minute. Aunt Bernice stayed in the living room as the final minute slipped away.

“Hurry!” yelled those of us who were close to the roller. “Times almost up! Hurry!!”

“Ding!” the timer announced.

“That’s it!” Aunt Bernice announced. She inspected to make sure each of us had at least one present. “OK, you can open your presents.”

Eagerly we ripped the wrapping paper from our Bunko spoils. Each was filled with Christmas chocolate, candy cane, lifesaver or other treats. Then Aunt Bernice pulled out a garbage bag to clean up the spent gift wrappings. While I don’t know this is how our first Take Away Bunko game actually played out, you can get a sense of how we play our traditional Christmas game.

Thus began ‘Bunko’ at Zilligen Christmas. Like taking over the hosting Zilligen Christmas, we took over contributing to Take Away Bunko. Now each family brings 20-40 gifts. With the 25-28 participates we typically have 4 to 6 pie pans of dice going around. As our families had children they would begin next to their parents until they were old enough to play on their own. To this day we remind Danielle about crying when I stole a present from her during the stealing phase when she was 4 years old.

A few new traditions have developed from Take Away Bunko. Such as the bombardment of others with wads of Christmas paper during clean up. Or the ‘Prized Present’ that is constantly stolen during the stealing stage. Typically larger presents garner this favor but sometimes it’s just a feel or a sound. Such presents can be stolen from the ‘winner’ as they make their way back to their seats. Also at the end are the grand trading sessions. It is amazing the trinkets a guy can get for a scented candle from one of the girls. Or what a kid will trade an adult for a few chocolate kisses. Guests are welcomed to participate in Take Away Bunko. There are always plenty of gifts to be won.

In the beginning, we bought gifts for each other, with the except of Dave and I. However, the reality was Dave and I were not the ones buying the presents for Hope, Lee and Dawn. While we were picking them out, Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack were picking up the tab in the beginning. Eventually, we would draw names for Christmas gifts – as we do today. I would love to know who had who in those original gift drawings.

Zilligen Christmas evolved as we stepped into adulthood. In the beginning, we would gather at Aunt Bernice and Uncle Ray’s house but eventually, we would have Zilligen Christmas at different homes. I imagine it was a bit awkward for our cousins, particularly the ones we were each growing up with.

One year, when Hope was in college, she brought her boyfriend with her. We had heard she was dating this guy – ‘Dave’ who she met in college. In fact, I first met Dave Reis when my cousin Keith Stein, who Dawn grew up with, and I went down to Northern Illinois University for an Outlaw and UFO concert back in 1981. A couple of years later when Dave and Hope married in 1983, they bought a house in Palatine on Slade Avenue close to Uncle Dick’s hardware store in downtown Palatine. Zilligen Christmas had found a new location that following December, along with the latest addition to Zilligen Christmas with the birth of Stephanie that September.

While Zilligen Christmas was for us Zilligens, at some point, as Hope showed us, we would begin to bring our boyfriends or girlfriends. Soon after Dave Reis started coming. Dave and Hope got engaged in 1983 so Dave was added to the drawing. From there each boyfriend or girlfriend was added to the drawing after the couples were engaged. Desi Dament in 1986, Cindy Gookin in 1987 and Mike Rogers in 1990.

As Dave and Hope filled in their family, the rest of us learned what it meant to be aunts and uncles around birthdays and Christmas. Sharing in the excitement of Christmas through the eyes of children, for us without kids, was magical. We did not have the responsibility of being full-time parents. We were not the first aunts and uncles to ‘wind them up and leave’ but we were perfecting it.

As the Zilligen clan continued to grow we were finding it harder each year to find a time during the holidays we could get together. The addition of boyfriends and girlfriends/husbands and wives was juggling the schedules with newfound obligations to our in-laws. While the desire to get together won out every year it was decidedly getting harder each year to coordinate the schedules. We decided to solve our scheduling issue by designating New Years Day for Zilligen Christmas. This worked great the first year but not so well the following year. In 1990 we had to reschedule Zilligen Christmas because Dave had to take Hope to the hospital to have their 3rd daughter, Danielle. While Danielle disrupted the 15th Zilligen Christmas, we now had a permanent solution to our dessert dilemma – Birthday cake.

Now that we had a date, we began the rotation of houses. As each couple bought a house, we shifted Zilligen Christmas that house. This began with Cindy and Dave’s townhouse in 1990, followed by our house in 1991. Lee’s and Dawn & Mike’s houses were also added to the rotation. The Host House would provide the main meal, while everyone else provide the side dishes. During Lee’s second rotation he decided on Chinese for the dinner menu. It was his dream come true.

By this time Zilligen Christmas had swelled to 18 or 19 people, adults and children. A few things happened around during this time. Dave Zilligen became the Master of the Names. One Christmas he produced ping pong balls each with the name of a Zilligen on them. This was much easier than the annual scramble for scraps of paper by the hostess each Christmas. Since Dave became the Master of Names, Cindy became the Scribe of Names. Of course, the names were drawn from a Santa’s hat.

It was also decided, now that Dave and Hope’s family was getting older, the Zilligen cousins would join the adult drawing and no longer receive gifts from all the aunts and uncles. This began when you turned 13. Another rule remerged as well, the Reis’ names were removed from the Santa hat and added after all the Reis’ had drawn their names. This prevented them from drawing themselves. Cindy and Desi also decided not to get gifts for each other’s kids and save those gifts for Christmas with the Beckman Christmas where we were raised.

As Stephanie and the other Reis girls got older, they began to bring their boyfriends to Zilligen Christmas. Like the original Zilligens, it was decided that while boyfriends did not participate in the Name Drawing, this changed with fiancees. The uncles would love to remind the Reis girls’ boyfriends about this rule by announcing, “There’s still time to get into the drawing!” With an open palm, they would laugh and politely decline the uncles’ offers. When it was official, Dave would announce the addition of their ping pong ball to the Santa hat before the drawing and another round of congratulations would be given to the new couple.

We also realized the Zilligen clan had outgrown Lee’s humble dwellings, so in 2000, Dave and Hope took Lee’s rotation as the host house for Zilligen Christmas. This established the rotation of Host Houses we have today. The other addition in 2000 was establishing the Zilligen Christmas Christmas list online. A few years earlier I had obtained the zilligen.com domain. Owning the domain turned web development into a hobby. Nothing I would make a living at but something to keep me current in internet technologies. You can view the rotation of names and host houses from 2000 to date. It has become my responsibility to update this list every year. It is interesting to look at the list to see who had who in the past.

When other families discuss drawing names for Christmas is discussed, I have Zilligen Christmas to drawn upon regarding rules and potential issues families could run into. It would be great to say we had no other tragedies after our parents however this is not the case. We lost Dawn’s husband Mike to lung cancer in 2007. I remember a conversation with Dawn a few months prior to Christmas that she was to take Bob’s name, and since I had Mike, I would take Steve, who was Dawn’s pick that year. That fixed the drawing for 2007. Zilligens, if nothing else, are practical.

With the divorce of Danielle and Alex, we lost another name. That was tough since they lived within walking distance to the Rogers and Dawn’s family had grown close to Alex. There are few scenarios our family has not gone through that we have not worked out.

Hope made a comment on Facebook a few years ago on the 40th Zilligen Christmas – forty years. Forty years ago our parents died splitting our family into four parts. From the original five to twenty-seven of us. I think Mom would be very proud of us.

So if you haven’t already figured it out already, the ‘Godzilla’ song came from a Christmas gift. After our first Zilligen Christmas, Lee went back to more traditional gifts rather than paint us a picture each year. By our third Christmas, Lee got me Blue Oyster Cult’s ‘Specter’ album. I recognized the group as the band that had done ‘(Don’t Fear) The Reaper’. Besides the AOR hit of ‘Godzilla’ it also had the minor hit ‘Goin’ Through The Motions’. Blue Oyster Cult was markedly different than my current band – The Beach Boys. It was the beginning of me collecting albums.

This led to the purchase of their follow-up album ‘Some Enchanted Night’. It was a single live album that ended up being Blue Oyster Cult’s biggest selling album. Of course, I had purchased my copy on 8-track. I was excited by the heavier more aggressive sounds. While Blue Oyster Cult was a far cry from the Beach Boys, my musical tastes would continue to evolve and they would only represent a part of the type of music I would be what I would be buying in 3 years.

That evening when Dave and I got home from Zilligen Christmas I put the ‘Specter’ album with the stack of 6 or 7 8-tracks that Dave and I had collected so far. It was great seeing our Hope, Lee and Dawn again. Lee had opened me up to a new type of music. It was one of the first albums we had, everything else was an 8-track tape. I was awakened to the idea of collecting albums, like collecting my pop cans. But the music – there was so much out there. I didn’t know this at the time but I was going to learn. Music would become my way of understanding my human experience, and understanding what I was going through.

A bit of an epilogue on my story about Zilligen Christmas. Many years later while Dave and Hope were raising their family on Slade, we all met one spring day at their home. Hope had received a couple of boxes that were from our gray house. She thought we should open them together.

In the unpacking, we ‘oo’ed and ‘ah’ed over the various items we recognized from our childhoods. The clear and red glass ‘candy holder’, as we called it. Various dishes and glasses that sparked poignant childhood memories for all of us. As we continued to uncover forgotten household items of our past, we began reading the old 1975 newspaper that everything was wrapped in. It was fascinating. Now that we were all on our own we couldn’t believe the price of rent, TV’s, cars, etc.  back then.

As our discoveries were ending, the biggest treasure was found at the bottom of one of the boxes. A small cartridge of undeveloped film. Hope had the film developed not knowing if anything would still be saved from the old cartridge.

It turned out to be from Mom’s camera. There were pictures of Dawn’s birthday party, Aunt Kathy and Uncle Dale’s dogs we had watched and our last Christmas together.

In the first summer we moved in with Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack, not only did we need to get signed up for school, we also joined their church – Zion Lutheran Church. With my parents, we went to church and Sunday School every week. In fact, my parents were the custodians so it would not be unusual to be at Messiah Lutheran 2 or 3 times a week. Our church life was woven into our family life.

Like my parents, Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack’s family went to church and Sunday School. But besides being signed up for Sunday School, John and I were also enrolled for confirmation class. For Lutherans, confirmation was a right of passage. It was to ‘confirm’ your beliefs in God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. It is you, as an individual, now confirming your faith that previously your parents and your godparents did on your behalf when you were baptized. Confirmation classes were additional classes during the week for 7th and 8th graders. At the end of your 8th-grade year, you would be confirmed and considered to be a full member of The Church. For most kids, this was just another thing your parents signed you up for that you did not have a choice in.

At twelve years old, the kids in confirmation class were just doing what they were told. At this age, many of us were trying to see what we could get away with. We viewed this as an additional 2 hours a week of school. How was I supposed to understand religion? How were we going to understand the complexities of faith? On top of that, I was learning how to live without my parents – and with a new family. At this point in my life, when it came to religion, I wasn’t even sure if there was a god. And if God was there, I wasn’t going to ask him how to pass a class, I was going to ask him why he took my parents away.

At twelve years old, I was a good kid. For the most part, I was obedient to what adults asked of me. School? of course. Confirmation class? ok – whatever. Mow the grass? shovel snow? yep. Paper route? if you say so. I didn’t want to make any trouble. I felt incredibly grateful to be taken care of at this point. As awkward as junior high can be for kids, I was just trying to figure out how to live because I didn’t know anymore.

I don’t remember who said it or where I heard it, but there was a family rumor that grandma Zilligen had wanted us Zilligen kids to be put in an orphanage. Thankfully due to the love the Beckman family showed Dave and me, we never felt like orphans. So there was a shock value when the word ‘orphan’ was associated with us.

So after a year of losing my parents, I was going to try to understand what it meant to be a Lutheran? Well, I would at least learn enough to pass this class – so I could be confirmed. Like I said, I was basically a good kid. Later I would tackle the bigger questions – like what being a Lutheran, or a Christian, really meant.

One aspect about kids in Sunday School that non-church goers may not realize is that because churches draw people from outside their school districts, ‘church kids’ don’t necessarily know the other kids in their church, even if they are in the same grade. So the 7th Grade Confirmation class – would not be just kids from your school. Deerfield had two junior high schools – Wilmot and Sheppard. But our church also had kids from Highland Park or Northbrook. I don’t remember where the kids in my Confirmation class were from but outside of Jim Reuter and Jeff Parker and a couple of girls who went to Wilmot Junior High. We would only see each other once a week, actually twice a week – once for Sunday School and again for Confirmation Class.

Like most youth organizations, churches understand this new cross-section of kids and the need for activities so they can get to know each other. Lock-Ins are classic church Youth Events. Again, for the non-church goers, Lock-ins are events that adult church leaders would plan. They consist of an evening of games and lessons for the kids and end with everyone staying overnight in the basement of the church. No one could leave – thus we were ‘locked-in’. Our church Zion Lutheran only had one Lock-In that I can remember. But we did a number of other activities outside of the church so we could get to know each other.

It was during one of these ‘other activities’ that I first heard “Blinded By The Light”. The 8th-grade confirmation class going to a roller skating rink. During the mid-seventies, Roller Skating rinks were experiencing a resurgence with the help of Disco and renewed interest in the 50’s. This was thanks to the tv show ‘Happy Days‘. Transportation was typically provided by volunteer parents. The class was split over 2 or 3 cars. I piled in the way-back of a station wagon with, thinking I was with the ‘cool Confirmation kids’. One could argue there were no ‘cool kids’ in Confirmation class – but everything is just a matter of degrees, right?

As we piled into the way-back of a station wagon (seatbelts be damned!) the vehicle filled with the buzz of adolescent dialogue and hyperactivity. Whoever’s parent was driving had the radio tuned to a pop music station, most likely WLS. Conversations droned on from homework to teachers, to tv shows, movies and music.

It was during this adolescent buzz that that radio played “Blinded By The Light.” Us kids in the ‘way back’ discussing the off-color lyrics of the song – “wrapped up like a douche when you’re roller’ in the night.”

“A what?” I asked.

“A douche,” one of the kids said.

“Oh, yea,” I said.

I didn’t know what a douche was. I had heard of a ‘douche bag’ and ‘being a douche’ but I didn’t know exactly what a douche was – just that they were bad. The conversations were punctuated with giggles and laughter. But one of the kids caught on to my ignorance.

“You know what a douche is, right?” he asked.

“Sure,” I lied.

“What is it?”

“It’s like a douchebag.” I said, “Like being a dick.”

“So you’re saying a douche is a penis?”

“Kinda,” I said.

Kinda – this is a word that starts the beginning of losing an argument. It is a foretelling of failure; a predictor of implosion; a first-person adjective for wishy-washy. ‘Kinda’ meant you were straddling two sides – the correct side and the wrong side. You were thinking you were on the wrong side but trying not to give that fact away. With experience and grace, the Receiver of a ‘Kinda’ would give try more leeway to the Initiator of a ‘Kinda’. To allow the Initiator a gracious departure of their failing argument; a retreat. This is not true for junior high kids. This was a signal to attack.

“Dude!” the ‘Kinda Receiver’ said. Then he leans over to me and says “A douche is how girls clean their private parts.”

Apparently, this was not covered in any of the three sex ed classes I had so far. I was beginning to learn I still had a lot more to learn about sex, even after 3 days of sex ed classes over the last three years. Apparently my shocked looked betrayed my ignorance because the ‘Kinda Receiver’ announced to the whole way-back of the station wagon, “He doesn’t know what a douche is!” Even the kids in the back seat heard this announcement.

For the rest of the ride to the rolling skating rink, I was quiet. Besides the embarrassment being called out for not knowing what a douche was, I was trying to figure out why this would be in a song in the first place. Surely the singer knew what a douche was. Maybe it was put in by accident. Last year we all heard the scream on “Love Rollercoaster” when that girl was killed in the studio next store when they were recording, so who knows what happens in those recording studios.

Besides moving in with Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack and changing schools, I was also starting Junior High – that magical time in any child’s life where a child find themselves and their spiritual well being.

OK, none of that is true. Most kids are trying to find friends and where they fit in. I was no different. So this confirmation class was just another set of kids that I had to figure things out where I fit in. Jim Rueter and Jeff Parker went to my school, but no one else did. The girls didn’t count because I was too afraid to talk to them. And there also was my cousin John.

At this point, the natural pairing of John and I was getting old. When Dave and I first moved in and John & I were paired off it was great. We were both into plants and fishing. Prior to us moving in, John and Jim had hatched chicks – which resulted in their pet rooster Fluffy. Because of this, I remember John and I designed an egg enterprise we were going to call BZ Eggs (get it – Beckman & Zilligen?). We would wander greenhouses together looking at different plants. We would spend hours together fishing Lake Eleanor behind the house.

But after a while, I didn’t want to always be connected with John. I’m guessing this is how twins feel sometimes. In hindsight, this was us becoming more siblings than just cousins or friends. Each time we were forced together, I was getting the feeling I didn’t always want to be ‘stuck’ with him. It was bad enough I was stuck with Dave but age provided a natural borderline. John and I were only two months apart in age.

This led to some unsavory social behavior on my part. Well, not really THAT unsavory – more like stupid kid stuff. Nothing to do with John, just part of my efforts to try to fit in with the cool kids, the cool kids in confirmation class, and typically centered around our extracurricular activities.

My Confirmation class was a cross-section of church kids. Which meant – there were no burnouts or surfer dudes in this class, or studly jocks or blonde bombshell, just your normal nerdy middle-of-the-road kids here. There were 12 kids in our class and we met once a week. And we did our obligatory ‘extracurricular’ church activities. This filled our Wednesday evenings with lessons about our Lutheran belief: Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the Lord’s Supper/Communion, Baptism, the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostle’s Creed, the Ten Commandments, etc. Our lessons were based on Luther’s Small Catechism.

On the surface, this was basic religious stuff. But digging into some of these topics were pretty tough for adolescents to really understand. Some were ‘no-brainers’, for example, there wasn’t much discussion about the commandment ‘You shall not Kill’ – well, duh! Really hard to argue against this. On the other side, we were also going into some already confusing concepts like The Trinity. So there’s only one God but he’s three different people: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. So the Holy Spirit is a person too? but its all around us? I thought that was God? Yes, the Trinity – wait, what?

One tradition of Confirmation class was the 8th-graders would go on a weekend retreat to focus on our studies. I was actually looking forward to this trip. The retreats were held at Lutherdale in Elkhorn, WI. This was the same bible camp my family used to spend a week at once a year under beautiful summer Wisconsin skies.

Lutherdale held some of my favorite memories growing up. We could swim in a lake, canoe, do crafts, read, hike, sing and have campfires. With my family, the boys stayed in the cabins to the north and the girls stay in ‘cabins’ by the main building with my mom. They weren’t really cabins like the boys’ cabins. They were more modern and seemed more like apartments. But we were boys and we were ‘roughing it’. Dad never came on these week vacations.

To this day, when I smell breakfast food outside it takes me back to those summer weeks at Lutherdale. All meals were served family-style. And it was not unusual for me to be up before 7:00 am and wandering around outside. And a few of us lucky early risers would be able to ring the big red bell that stood in a 10-foot wooden tower. The bell was used to announce to the camp that breakfast, or whatever meal was being served, was now ready.

Everyone would gather in the dining hall and the camp pastor would lead us in prayer and give instructions on who was getting the food for the table, who was getting the drinks, who was cleaning up the table and when we were dismissed. I remember the camp pastor, particularly because his left arm was shriveled – I think was his left arm. It was very distracting as a kid and we were instructed not to stare at it.

During family camp, we spend time in the Craft Hut where camp counselors passed along their creativity. I remember making sand candles (wax poured into sand), masked tape bottles and my first forages into macrame and sand art. The Craft Hut counselors taught me about the wonders of Mod Podge. Meanwhile, at the camp’s chapel, Mr. Owl would play piano starting 1/2 hour before the morning’s lesson. She was willing to play any requested hymn. Inevitably someone would call out a Christmas Carol. Mrs. Owl would happily play the requested hymn even though it was July. We were amazed at how she knew the page numbers of the called out hymns in the Lutheran hymnal. Our voices would fill the chapel as others would file in for the morning or evening lessons.

I especially remember the long sunny summer afternoons swimming in the lake in a section designated as the swimming area on Lauderdale Lake. The camp used the ‘Buddy System’ so if you wanted to swim, you would need to find someone to swim with. To track this, each swimmer would put their numbered tags on a single hook on a board together. Occasionally the lifeguards on duty would yell, “Buddy Up!” and you would have to find your ‘buddy’ and grab their hand so the lifeguards could see you were not swimming alone. Of course, this wouldn’t prevent a double drowning but it would certainly cut down the odds. My brother Dave was typically my buddy.

Dave and I also learned to canoe on Lauderdale Lake. The Buddy System was also used for canoers. This allowed us to check out the needed paddles and life preservers as well. Dave and I would explore the coastline on either side of the camp. One of my greatest discoveries was finding out some of the seaweed in the lake was actually bladderworts. I would pull out this ‘seaweed’ and examine the ‘bladders’ and imagine how their little traps would work in the water. Bladderworts are an aquatic carnivorous plant I learned about after receiving a Venus Fly-Trap bulb from Dad. This likely fueled my recurring dreams of finding Venus Fly-Traps, Pitcher Plants and Sundews while wandering around in a field.

I also remember long lazy summer afternoons hanging out with Mom as she would spread out a blanket on the hill that led to the lake. I would bring my books to read next to her. Back then these were typically books about ants, carnivorous plants or cactus. With a cooling breeze coming off the lake, Mom would work on her needlepoint of the Last Supper or read. It seemed like she had been working on this needlepoint forever. She would eventually give her masterpiece to Pastor Keyes, our pastor at Messiah Lutheran in Park Ridge, IL. It really was a masterpiece, I was very impressed when it was finished. Other campers would occasionally stop by us and were equally impressed.

Mom was a meeting place for my siblings while we were at camp. I must admit, another reason I would hang out with Mom on those afternoons was to be around when the canteen would open. The ‘canteen’ was a little room with a window that opened to outside so counselors sell candy and ice creams to the campers. Ice cream on a hot afternoon as a rare treat at home would be an almost daily treat at Family Camp.

After supper, there would be an evening service followed by a bible study for adults and younger lessons for kids. Typically the kids gathered with the camp counselors down by a fire next to the lake.

I do remember occasionally accompanying Mom to the Adult Bible study. I’d like to think I was curious about one particular adult bible study on Esther. More likely I had done something to Dave. So my punishment was not being allowed to go to the campfire and forced to accompany Mom as she attended the Bible study. It turned out I found this Bible study to be very interesting and I returned the following evening to learn more about Esther and Mordecai. I don’t know if it was the reaction of the adults surprised I was not with the younger kids or if I actually outgrowing the ‘kid stuff’. I actually read Esther from Mom’s Living Bible, which I still have to this day. I think I was taking advantage of showing off my maturity and getting a chance to use Mom’s leather-bound bible. Nothing like sucking up to the locals at bible camp by reading a fancy bible on a sunny afternoon. That was the first ‘free reading’ of the bible I ever did until I attempted to read the Bible in its entirety after my parents died.

More typical was me going with my brother and sisters, and the Hippie youth leaders, sitting around a campfire and singing Kumbaya. This is when I learned this song. This was years before ‘Kumbaya’ became a sarcastic insincere moment of bonding. Once we were taught Kumbaya, we would sing it at church, at home or while we were riding our bikes. The counselors taught us many songs but Kumbaya was the song that would universally represent Bible Hippies singing around campfires at Bible Camps across the US.

The other song I remember learning at Lutherdale was “Pass It On”. This was years later during a different Family Camp but this time without my family. It was the summer after Dave and I had moved in with Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack, and John and Jim. It was a great, awkward and very different week.

That week we were joined by our cousins John and Jim. Later Dave and I would learn this was the first time they had spent time away from their parents. While it was great to be back at Lutherdale it was also weird sharing our family camp with our ‘new brothers’. Dave connected with one particular counselor who was in a singing group called Brethren. I believe his name was John and his group Brethren actually recorded a real album! At the end of the week, the counselor gave Dave an autographed copy of his album. I’ll admit I was a little jealous of the attention Dave was receiving. I also believe he inspired Dave to sing which led Dave to join Chorus in Wilmot Junior High, Deerfield High School, Valparaiso University and professionally (singing at weddings, etc.).

That week at Lutherdale, Dave’s new friend John and the rest of Brethren would sing ‘Pass It On’ after an evening meal. It would be a favorite request around the campfire that week as well. And it remains a favorite hymn for me to this day. It always brings me back to the warm glow of a Lutherdale campfire against the dark water background.

Another very strong memory from that week was when John and Jim called home because they were homesick. They were allowed to use the phone in the dining hall. Dave and I hung out on the screened porch just off the dining hall. There were many tears and alot of yelling about wanting to come home. They didn’t like Lutherdale. I couldn’t help choking up myself. At first, I didn’t understand how they could not enjoy being at camp, the lake, the Craft Hut, the campfires, the Canteen, etc. But then I realized my own homesickness – and mine was permanent. It was not lost on me, even while it was happening. Hearing Jim yell at his mom, literally screaming at times, to come to pick him and John up was heartwrenching. It also caused Dave and I to realize we had no one we could call. Despite our week of paradise, that phone call shook us back to our reality of life without our parents.

Besides being accompanied by John and Jim that week, there were a couple of additional guests at Lutherdale that week., Mr. and Mrs. Johnson. Mr. and Mrs. Johnson were friends of my parents from our old church Messiah Lutheran. I’m sure this was no coincidence. I don’t remember my sister Hope being there. I mention this because their daughter Becky and Hope were very good friends and that seems strange she would not be with them.

One sunny afternoon I remember being in the cabin by myself. I was crying over the loss of my parents as I would occasionally do. Mr. Johnson came in and despite my best efforts, I could not hide the fact that I had been crying. Mr. Johnson sat down on the bunk across from me. After a few quiet moments, he told me how he was a soldier in World War II.

He told me, “One day my commander gathered us together. He told us we were going to take this hill from the enemy the next day. ‘There were going to be a high casualty rate, many of you will not make it,’ he said. All night I thought about that next day. I was so angry at God. The next day, the day we were going to take that hill, was my mom’s birthday. All I could think about was my mom hearing that I had died on her birthday. I couldn’t understand why God would do this to my mom.

“The next morning we took the hill. I cursed God as I charged up that hill with my buddies. Some of my friends were shot and some of them were killed but I kept fighting up that hill. After hours of fighting, I finally got to the top. I had made it, I was still alive. And I realized I had been cursing God the whole way up thinking about my mom and dying. But though I said some of the worse things I’ve ever said, God still protected me.

“John, I know losing your parents doesn’t make any sense but trust in God. As I stood on that hill I was so ashamed about what I said and I didn’t put my trust in God. No matter how bad things get, trust that God is always watching over you.”

It was the first time I had heard an actual war story from someone that was there. I knew he was sharing a very personal story because he took off his glasses to wipe his own tears. We sat on that bottom bunk not talking – just looking out the cabin’s dirty window.  Eventually, Mr. Johnson patted my leg, said he was going to find Mrs. Johnson and left.

I didn’t know how to respond. I was still very angry with God over the loss of my parents. It wasn’t fair. Contrary to Mr. Johnson, I thought, I had always trusted God so I didn’t understand why he took them away from us. The difference between Mr. Johnson and my story was he survived that day, my parents did not. If he hadn’t perhaps his mother and I could have cursed God together. But that obviously was not His plan. While I wasn’t sure how to take Mr. Johnson’s story, I understood it was a very personal moment he did not share with many people.

In the coming years, I would remember Mr. Johnson’s story. While my faith would eventually break, I learned that sharing your tragedy with others was very powerful. Like Love, when you open yourself up to your ’emotional core’ and allow that reopened wound to heal, it heals stronger then it was before. That afternoon I realized I was just beginning to charge up my own hill. And like Mr. Johnson, I would survive. And, again like Mr. Johnson, I would share my story with others. And while my telling would sometimes be painful, I knew I would be stronger for it. I would use my story to lend perspective to others. That week would be the last time I remember seeing Mr. and Mrs. Johnson.

Over the years, I have shared my story about how my parents died, in fact, many many times. People who know me, particularly those who know Dave and my other brothers and sisters, would often remark on how ‘normal’ we appeared. I always found this comforting. Because ‘normal’ was all I ever wanted to be. While our past threatened to overwhelm us, while it deformed, skewed, misshapen and warped us – we were all made stronger and weaker.  Normal? yea – for me, that would perfect.

So if we appeared ‘normal’ it meant our upheaval in the last two years did not perspectively seep into our everyday lives. This is given to the fact that today we live in an age where kids get special attention for anything that isn’t viewed as ‘normal’, Dave and I, nor Hope, Lee or Dawn as far as I know, ever saw a psychiatrist or social worker or spent extra time with clergy. We found our own answers and kept any deformity at bay.

I take particular pride in navigating the moral and philosophical issues of my parents’ deaths presented to me while I was growing up. That isn’t to say I didn’t make alot of wrong turns and mistakes. One of my first wrong turns was blaming God. This particular mistake would not be corrected for twenty years. But by blaming God I began to move on with my life. That isn’t to say I stopped questioning ‘Why?’ but I stopped waiting for an answer to my situation. This led to the following conclusions, what I would later refer to as  my mantra:

1. I became Agnostic. I liked to think there was a higher power but God did not play a part in my daily life. I found it ironic wanting a higher power but something had to have kicked off the Big Bang, right?
2. Religion was a crutch. A strong person didn’t need religion but there are times and points in your life when you are hurt and need to heal – at those moments religion can be a refuge. The problem is some people would lean on their religion too much and never truly take responsibility for their own lives.
3. People are basically good. In high school, I would argue that people were 51% good and 49% bad and individuals would run between those ratios as well. It was this basic belief that would keep me from wanting to condemn the entire human race and keep some hope.
4. Life was a series of random acts, most are without intent. We should appreciate the statistical anomalies that affect us in both good and bad ways.

With this ‘mantra’ I started my life. I knew I had a unique perspective. I would test these core beliefs with discussions with my friends and a lot of thinking. I felt empowered by these conclusions but I also knew some were contrary to my family’s beliefs. So this led me to hide my true feelings and thoughts on religion. It also was the beginning of my multiple personality disorder.

OK, so I don’t really have a multiple personality disorder, but by the time I had figured out my way around high school, it felt like it. While my birth name is John, in Junior High I was given a nickname of ‘Waba’. At the same time, to avoid confusion at home with my cousin John and my Uncle Jack, whose real name is John, I received another nickname – Trike. On my path to figuring out my past and my life I wrote this poem:

People say I’m so different,
they say sometimes I’m someone else
Only my best friends know me all,
we all have our characteristics

First, there’s John, he’s rather depressed,
he’s always live in the past
His mind is just a one-way road,
it always seems to be death, death, death

Then there’s Trike, he’s rather quiet,
he always does what he is told
If you want to find him there’s two places to go,
he’s either at church or he’s sitting at home

Then there’s Waba, he’s rather strange
he goes out to drink and smoke
He’s rather crazy and he’s never alone,
I’m afraid someday, he will go too far

Well, that’s me, that all of us,
we get along most of the time
When I grow up I don’t know who I’ll be,
somedays I wish I could just be me

The poem spoke to the various roles I thought I played. In hindsight, it was easier to ‘go with the flow’ when playing these roles. In high school, I was not very active in the church. While John and I volunteered to take care of the plants in the atrium, this was really about our interests in plants rather than to serve the church in the form of stewardship. But by the time we got to high school, we all had part times jobs on the weekends and occasionally this included working Sunday morning. And while we still went to church services but we didn’t always stay for Sunday School. Trike was the more demure character that would take care of the plants at church. Or play guitar for the summer services. And he was always polite and respectful of his elders.

John represented my past which I was trying to put behind me. As I would learn, this was not always possible. He still loved ants, cactus and carnivorous plants. He would fly model rockets, look for mushrooms in the Olson’s woods and look for, and some times transplant, wildflowers (Soloman Seals, Prairie Trillium, Jack-In-Pulpits, Mayapples and White Trillium) into our backyard. And it was John that would learn to play Dungeons and Dragons. He would always have a book he was reading, which included Stephen King novels and later fantasy and science fiction. He also collected pop cans and monster magazines.

Waba became my extroverted self – my carefree, talkative, confident character. It was Waba that first smoked pot at a party senior year. And Waba that would have an assistant manager at Franks Nursery where he worked fill the trunk of his car with bottles of Jack Daniels and beer (and Southern Comfort for Jeff). But Waba was still shy around girls but he would be the only one of the three to make any progress. And Waba loved his music.

It was easier to act a certain way in certain situations. It was these roles and these characters that I began to use in school and confirmation classes. Trike would really try to understand what Luther was trying to tell us about the foundations of our Lutheran beliefs. John would play ‘doubting Thomas’ asking unanswerable questions and blaming God for the pain in his heart. Waba would sit in class and look at the girls. And try to find ways to connect with the guys that could talk to the girls.

So eighteen months after Mr. Johnson share his story with me, John and I, and our confirmation class, found ourselves at Lutherdale. But on a cold dark January weekend, Lutherdale was a strange place. It was not the warm family playground I had spent 3 or 4 summer weeks with my family. But my family had now changed drastically as well. That January night as my confirmation class got out of the cars that night, I stood in that cold parking lot next to the silent dark buildings as the adults figured out where we should go. I surveyed the snowy landscape that was both familiar and strange. The dormant slope that played host to so many fond memories which I knew laid below the light of the parking lot.

Like all confirmation retreats, the boys went to one cabin and the girls to another. Once we were inside the boys’ cabins, the sense of familiarity became stronger despite how cold it was. The boys claimed their bunks and were told to stay together on one side of the cabin. Each side of the cabin was capable of sleeping 12 people so almost everyone could have a top bunk. We were to unpack and then meet the girls in a room in the main building for our first lesson.

The weekend was a chance to focus on our lessons. We had 4 months before our confirmation. Besides diving deep into our studies on what it meant to be a Lutheran, the class had one more chance to bond together. But also keeping in mind we were all 13 and 14 years old. Even if we viewed Confirmation class as one more thing we had to get through, this retreat brought us closer to being done. I was doing what my aunt and uncle wanted me to do. But beneath that veneer, I was looking for an answer – why did God take my parents away.

My religious beliefs prior to their deaths were childlike. God was just part of who I was. In the years that followed I would try to understand what my brothers and my sisters and I did to deserve this.  Why had God turned against us? Confirmation class was not prepared to deal with my situation. And I did not use these classes to test Pastor Trendel. Like the social circles in junior high, I was learning what role I should play. I would not be the center of attention. I would act normal, or like the other kids, ignoring my questions and doing what was expected of me. If I was called on, I would give the right answers – or what I thought was the right answer. I would search for my own answers by reading the Bible or the Small Catechism.  But I did not find my answers there. And like the other kids in class, some of this stuff just didn’t make sense to me.

For the most part, our class was pretty well behaved – for the most part. Pastor Trendel would occasionally need to deal with the boys trying to show off in front of the girls. Maybe it was boredom, maybe it was reacting to some of the topics we discuss. There were some heavier questions. For example, while I knew I wasn’t perfect, it didn’t make sense to me that babies that were not baptized were still sinners. Logically, they couldn’t do anything yet so why would they not go to heaven? Also, I found the ‘Three-in-One’ confusing. Yes, One God, but there were three of them. I found a better explanation later as the states of elements – like ice, water and steam. The lessons were more about giving the right answers described by Martin Luther in his Small Catechism. This was not a philosophy class after all. Many of my questions were much deeper, more complex, more on an adult level. But trying to find my answers in the Bible was like a schizophrenic trying to find out what is wrong with themselves by reading an intro to psychology book. It was not going to happen in Confirmation class

So depending on the setting and other things going in class, I would slip in and out of my various characters. This led me to do some stupid things. For example, on our retreat at Lutherdale after dinner but before resuming our studies, two of the girls, two of the guys, and I went to explore the frozen lake. We were really just trying to get away from the chaperones. Being winter, the only places we could go to were the boys’ cabin, the girls’ cabin and the main building. So walking around on a frozen lake seemed like a perfectly logical place to hang out. And besides getting out from being ‘supervised, the cold dark lake hike seemed like the ‘cool’ thing to do. And who knows, maybe I could actually talk to the girls Jim and Jeff were hitting on.

While we were on the lake, someone realized the time. We were supposed to be meet back with the group at 7:00 to continue our lessons. So someone came up with the brilliant idea that if we all set our watches back by 10 minutes, we could just play dumb and we wouldn’t get in any trouble.

Not a brilliant idea but I was pleased just to be in on the scheme. All I had to do is figure out how to change the time on my digital watch. When we all strolled into the room at 10 minutes after 7:00, the assistant minister Giesela’s frustration with our tardiness was apparent. We all gave the best looks of astonishment we could mustard. We quickly conversed with each other – “What does your watch say?” “I’ve got seven.” “Yea, me too!” “So do I,” I announced, probably too loudly. I was happy to be on the bad boys & girls team.

Pastor Trendal or his assistant Giesela didn’t buy our story. We were told to sit down and to open our books to the continued the lesson they had already started. Jim, Jeff and the girls exchanged silent giggles. And while I was on the lake as well and turned my watch to the agreed synchronized time, I was really not part of that team. But I would keep trying.

Part of my problem was I still interested in geeky stuff. That’s why 2 hours later when one of the kids convinced the Pastor we could play a new game he was playing called Dungeons and Dragons, I stood with Jim and Jeff and quietly scoffed at the kid and Pastor as they tried to get 15 of us to roll up characters to play this new game – that frankly, no one understood. After an hour, Pastor finally decided that Dungeons and Dragons was not the group game he was told it could be. He reorganized the chaos that had evolved and we settled down for the night. But when we left the next morning, I make sure I was in the Dungeon and Dragon kid’s car. You see, his car was stopping at the Dungeon Shop in Lake Geneva on the way back.

It turned out The Dungeon Shop was the hobby store that Gary Gygax, the inventor of Dungeons & Dragons, first distributed the game. I don’t know why I wanted to go to the Dungeon Shop, I didn’t have any money. What I really wanted was to learn more about this Dungeon and Dragons game. It turned out, according to the man behind the counter, that next year they were releasing their new version of the rules in the Players Handbook. So I gawked at the original box of 3 books. A year later I purchased the Player’s Handbook at Waldenbooks. This led to forming a group of 4-5 friends that would play Dungeons & Dragons on weekends and school days off. These sessions were typically held in Steve Olson’s basement. The group would consist of me, Steve Olson, his brother Mark, Jeff Riviera and Todd Combs with Steve or I playing the Dungeon Master. Those were good times.

While the trip back home allowed me to learn more about this Dungeon and Dragons game, actually playing the game was still over a year or two away. John and I were picked up in the church parking lot that Sunday. We still had to pass our confirmation class and get confirmed. Honestly, I never thought what would have happened if someone didn’t pass. Waba would not be the right character to use to finish up the few classes we had left. I suppose a kid that couldn’t pass confirmation would likely have other issues beyond passing a class for church.

By ’77 what I was really doing was finding my way in life. This included defining who I was and what I was expecting out of life. My various nicknames were convenient ways to split up the different backdrops I was playing against and dependant on who I was interacting with. It was the beginning of me looking at myself objectively. ‘John’ was decidedly part of the past and had the burden of understanding death. ‘Trike’ was the demure side of me that didn’t have the weight of death around him. ‘Waba’ was the reckless, carefree side of me that struggled to fit in with others. He was furthest from my past and would carry, sometimes crying, into the future.

Part of my solution was to tell the adults what they wanted to hear. They wanted me to be ok – so I was always ok. I would struggle with the senselessness of life when weighed with the death of my parents. This brought my first thoughts of suicide but with it, the tension of further pain to my brothers and sisters. It was a line I would not cross but dance back and forth over for relief to my pain.

It would be years before I would understand religion in any substantial way. In Eighth Grade, it was another class I needed to get through. Another backdrop for one of my characters to play in front of. Trike did a fine job giving the adults the answers they wanted to hear. He would keep John quiet with all his questions about hypocrisy and double standards. Because of this, it would be years before he would understand forgiveness and grace. Trike could be very practical and patience to a fault.

It would be Waba that would learn what a douche was from a bunch of kids in the back of station wagon on the way to a roller skating rink. And when I would hear ‘Blinded By The Light’ again on my new boombox I would learn it was a song by Manfred Mann. Occasional the radio station would play the album version which was about 2 minutes longer if you were lucky enough to catch it. And the kid that told me he was singing about a douche? He was the ‘douchebag’ – Manfred was singing about a deuce. The lyric went “wrapped up like a deuce when you’re roller’ in the night.”

I never felt like I was blinded by ‘the light’. Even when my faith grew stronger, there was never an epiphany or an awaking. In fact, I was just beginning to feel I was understanding ‘The Light’ – The Light of understanding this life. It was a feeling that I was understanding. In my ego, I thought I understood Life better than most of the people around me. It was this faith in my own understanding, not my religious faith, is what would anchor me in the coming years. And while this Light would guide me in the years and decades to come I would constantly lose my way and make mistakes – just like any other kid. I would continue to learn about Life and Death. How these two things would balancing me and my beliefs. And how The Light shined and brightened my living and my loving of the people in my life.

In the first summer Dave and I moved in with The Beckmans, Aunt Joyce signed me up to go to Wilmot Junior High School. Although my cousin John and I were the same age, he was not going to Wilmot. John struggled with reading so he was going to Deerpath Junior High School in Lake Forest. This meant I would be starting a new school this Fall by myself. Dave and Jim were going to Woodland Elementary. Dave would not have to endure a bunch of new kids by himself – he would have Jim to break the ice. On the other side, all the 7th-graders were new to Wilmot Junior High so I would not have to explain why I was living with The Beckmans. 

This was the second time in two years I would be starting a new school. When my family moved from the ‘Red House’ to the ‘Gray House’ we all had new schools – Hope went to Maine West High School, Lee went to Algonquin Junior High and Dave, Dawn and I went to West Elementary. We stayed until the end of the school year because there had been a discussion that if we moved mid-year Lee would have to go back to grade school because his junior high at the time went from 6th to 8th grade and Algonquin Junior High was only 7th to 8th grade. So Mom and Dad waited until the end of the school year.

The move to West Elementary would be the first time the teachers didn’t know who I was. Before we this, all my teachers knew ‘the Zilligens’ having had Hope and/or Lee before. At West Elementary none of the teachers would know who Dave, Dawn or I were, but they would learn in the next couple of years – until we moved away after my parents died.

One Summer morning Aunt Joyce and I went to Wilmot to get my class assignments and to pick up my gym uniform. Apparently, now that I was in Junior High, kids would be required to change our clothes for gym. That was worrisome. Being almost 200 pounds in 7th grade I was a little concerned about undressing in front of a bunch of kids I didn’t know. It was actually much worse than that.

The woman getting my gym uniform showed us the shirt with Wilmot Blue Jay on it. It was alright, maybe even cool. The shorts were fine – again with the Blue Jay logo but much smaller, even if the size was an adult large. And then there was this other thing that was in a plastic container she kind of mumbled through. It was something about supporting, what I assumed was the Wilmot sports teams. Everything was swept into a plastic bag and the woman said she would see me in a few weeks. Aunt Joyce grabbed the bag, said goodbye and out of the school we went.

When I got home and started inspecting my gym clothes. I wanted a closer look at that weird thing with the shirt and shorts. That turned out to be a ‘jockstrap’ – or as I figured out later – an Athletic Supporter. I opened up the package and dangled the elastic between my hands. “No, no, no, no, no” – How in the hell was I going to wear that? I had a few weeks to figure it out so I buried it in my dresser drawer. Or so I had thought.

Later that afternoon, I had come back from fishing and stepped into the porch to find Dave and Jim there. Dave was wearing my gym shirt which was probably four sizes too big for him. Jim was laughing so hard he could barely get out – “nice underwear!”

At this point, Dave lifted my shirt to reveal he was wearing my jockstrap. I was mortified. They knew! Dave knew what was going to happen so he took off through the kitchen to the front door. I was too shocked to realize what I was supposed to do. As he started running through the kitchen the shock wore off and that familiar wave came over me – I needed to punch him. As I had done so many times before. But this time he had too much of a head start for me to catch him. He was outside the front door by the time I had rounded the counter in the kitchen. From the front lawn, Dave taunted me dancing in my new Wilmot Junior High shirt. I continued to chase him around the house. Jim was barely able to stumble out of the front door to watch, he was laughing uncontrollably.

I was so ashamed that about the jock strap – they knew. As much as I tried to shame him back that they would have to wear them next year, clearly Dave wasn’t as embarrassed as I was about this new underwear. Wilmot Junior High was not starting off well.

Wilmot was a little over a mile away so I could ride my bike when the weather was good and walked if it wasn’t. When Lake Eleanor was frozen, I could shave a little time off my walk by cutting across the frozen lake.

But before I had to figure out my winter commute, I had to get through my first day at my new school. It did not start as inconspicuously as I wanted it to. That morning the plan was that Aunt Joyce would drop me off and I would walk home. I had to wait for the bell to ring to enter the school. So with all the other kids, I waited outside for the morning bell. This would be our routine for the next two years.

Wilmot combined three elementary schools: Dave and Jim’s school – Woodland Elementary, Wilmot Elementary and South Park (yes, just like the cartoon). That September morning, most of the kids were in groups of friends from these schools. Since I did not know anyone, I stood off to the side by myself waiting for the bell to ring to let us in.

It turned out I made the unfortunate choice of wearing one of my favorite t-shirts. It said ‘I’m with Stupid’ with a hand pointed to the position that was permanently reserved for Dave. But as one kid pointed out that morning, I was only with myself – so I must have been ‘stupid’. And so began my junior high career.

Not knowing anyone, I really just wanted to melt away, to pass through the hallways unnoticed. But at 200 pounds it was hard to not to be noticed. So I tried my best to fit in – so to speak. I remember the ‘first friend’ I made – Peter Vassiliades. He was the first kid to invite me over to his house. He lived on the other side of Deerfield Road, in a subdivision called Castlewood. That was the first kid’s house I went to since moving to Deerfield. Next was Mark Reisman’s house. Mark had just had his bar mitzvah and had gotten a pinball machine – a pinball machine in his house? So I went overthinking it would be a crappy tabletop version of pinball machine but it was a full size, plug-in, steel legged pinball machine called ‘Fireball!’ Holy crap!

Wait a minute – what’s a bar mitzvah? Apparently, it was like Confirmation for Jewish kids. Jewish kids? I thought Jews were the people in the bible. I didn’t know they were still around. I didn’t know very much about religion or the world. My world was very focused on dinosaurs, plants, animals, stamps and ghost stories. I knew I was Lutheran because that the way they talked about ‘our religion’ at church. I knew there were Catholics, they were the non-Lutherans (which, it turned out, was really the other way around). At this point in my life, I thought Christians and Lutherans were interchangeable. Mark was not the first Jewish kid I met when I moved to Deerfield. On the other side, junior high kids didn’t get into a lot of religious conversations – except when it came to the gifts.

Wilmot Junior High School was split into two grades, 7th and 8th. Each grade was split into two Teams – 1 and 2. The layout of the school was pretty basic: two east/west halls, the south hallway had two sets of four rooms to the south for each of the 7th-grade teams. The north hallway had two sets of four rooms to the north for 8th-grade teams. Both hallways were lined with lockers. On the west end was the open area for the gym with the boys’ locker room to the south and the girls’ locker room to the north. The gym also doubled as the lunch room. The library was in between the two main hallways with music, art and science lab near the gym. The faculty and main offices were in the main entrance on the east side. Wilmot had outgrown the original building so in the summer of ’76 there was construction to build a new gym and auditorium off the main entrance hallway to the north. Our graduating class of ’77 would be the first class to use this new addition,

My 7th-grade homeroom was in Mrs. Boruszak room who taught English. I tried to keep my head down but its hard for a fat kid not to be noticed. Junior high kids are very suspicious animals. They tend to sniff around at things that were bigger then they are. A few would come in for a closer look. Some will come closet for a nudge or a push. I had learned at my old school West, how you reacted to these initial pokes and prods would set the tone for how all other animals would react in the future.

A few months into the school year, Wilmot the junior high pack thought I needed a nickname. Some were forms of Zilligen but they apparently didn’t get much of a reaction from me – I had already heard most of them before. Some were cruel, some were just dumb. Then one morning during homeroom, Dean Smith came in and “I”ve got it! We’ll call him ‘Waba’ – Water Buffalo Association.” It was pointed out that actually, that was WBA which really wasn’t pronounceable.  Dean decided to put another ‘a’ in it so you could. It definitely wasn’t anything I had heard before. Dean’s nickname seemed to satisfy the rest of the pack. So over the next couple of weeks, then months – and then years. Waba became my nickname.

How many of you know anyone who has a nickname, that is not some form of their name, that is still used into their 50’s? I am still surprised by how long ‘Waba’ has actually stuck around. So here’s how a 50-year-old man got to be called ‘Waba’:

The teams in junior high were pretty isolated but apparently, ‘Waba’ had crossed over to Team 2. Over the summer I lost 50 pounds so that Fall I was under 150 pounds. Showing up at school that Fall some said I wasn’t Waba anymore but the name continued to stick. The Wilmot kids brought it to Deerfield High School. By the time I graduated that’s all anyone called me. In fact, many people didn’t know my real name. I think in high school kids would test me to see if I would answer to Waba – kids I didn’t know would say ‘Hi, Waba’. I always said ‘Hi’ back.

But Waba wasn’t my only nickname. When I had moved in with Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack I learned that Uncle Jack’s first name was actually John also. So my cousin John was a junior. Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack were also my Godparents. In the Brumm family, it was traditional that Godparents would get their Godchildren a gift for Christmas. Aunt Joyce would always sign my gift “To – Johnny Mike”. I believe it was my cousin Fred Turner that coined the phrase ‘Johnny Mike ride his trike’ which led to my other nickname – Trike. This name was pretty much just used in the family. But my aunts and uncles on my mom’s side would call me Trike. To this day, Aunt Joyce will refer to me as John Mike or Trike.

At my Aunt Betty’s wake in 2016, I saw my cousin Jeff and as I reached out to shake his hand he said, “How’s it going there Trike? Does anyone call you that anymore?”

“Just the aunts” I replied. And apparently a few cousins.

Waba actually transitioned over to Carthage College thanks to a couple of softball shirts that had ‘Waba’ displayed on the back. When asked about the ‘Waba’, I said it was a nickname. And so it spread at Carthage as well. At the time, Carthage was smaller than my high school it so the nickname actually spread even faster there. Just like in high school, by my senior year, no one knew my real name.

In the mid-80’s, before cell phones, Carthage dorms had one payphone per floor. Everyone took turns answering the payphone if it was ringing. One evening my senior year, Uncle Jack called me on the Don’s floor (South Hall, 4th Floor, South wing) where I lived. Back then Carthage had ‘fun names’ for their dorm floors.

Uncle Jack asked, “Is John Zilligen there?”

“We don’t have anyone by that name on this floor”

“Well, he’d better goddamned be there, he’s expecting my call!” Uncle Jack huffed.

The phone answerer asked another kid walking down the hall, “Do you know a John Zilligen?”

“Yea, that’s Waba”

Waba worked for me as a DJ name and was soon adopted by my brothers and sisters and at home for a while. My nieces and nephews called Uncle Waba – until they got older and thought they were too old to call me ‘Uncle Waba’ anymore. My wife Desi, continues to call me Waba to this day.

When you leave college, that typically is where your nickname ends. There’s a time to put childhood names aside but ‘Waba’ kept popping up. For example,  in the late 80’s we were invited to a watch a Bears-Packers game at my co-worker Mike Mecenas’ house with his wife and some other couples. During halftime, the nerdy guys got up to check out Mike’s latest computers games leaving the wives to talk. We finished the game together, made small talk and then our goodbyes. As we were getting our coats on and thanking our hosts, Desi, without thinking about it, referred to me as Waba.

Mike’s wife exclaimed, “Your Waba!? While we were talking during halftime you kept referring to ‘Waba’ and I didn’t know who that was! I was wondering if you were having an affair!”

We all laughed but I told Desi it was important that you have to be aware of how you refer to me. Now that I was out of college, and no longer DJing, Waba was starting to lose its recognition. I was an adult after all.

Fast forward ten years. I’m coaching Nate’s floor hockey. We had just ended a line during an exciting game. I was bringing the kids to huddle and discuss the next line’s strategy. Suddenly over the crowd noise, I heard…

“Waba!”

I looked up to Desi in the stands pointing to the floor. One of our kids had been hurt during the last play. It turns out Desi was yelling ‘John’ 3 or 4 times but not getting my attention. It was when she reverted to “Waba” that I finally looked up. Apparently, I was no longer responding to my own name.

So in 7th grade at Wilmot Junior High, Waba was born. But Waba was just a fat kid who lost weight and learned to fit in like everyone else. I was in Team I so Mr. Keasling was the science teacher. He was one of my favorite teachers that year. Probably because I loved science. I remember him talking about his thesis paper on paddlefish. I had never heard of paddlefish before. They were weird and decidedly cool.

Mrs. Novey was my math teacher, who happened to be pregnant that year. I remember that first day of class she was taking roll call. When she got to Tejinder Singh’s name she had some trouble pronouncing it. After a couple of false starts, Dean Smith blurted out, “Gesundheit!” Mrs. Novey and the class erupted. It’s a line I still use today when someone stumbles over how to pronounce a word.

Dean Smith was the class clown, at least in 7th grade. One morning, to everyone’s horror, Dean asked Mrs. Novey if she wanted to hear a Dead Baby joke. I don’t think the guys understood how inappropriate it was but there was almost a gasp from girls. Mrs. Novey didn’t skip a beat and told Dean to go ahead.

“What’s easier to load into a truck, a pile of bowling balls or a pile of dead babies?” Dean asked.

“I don’t know, ” said Mrs. Novey.

“A pile of dead babies because you can use a pitchfork”

The boys laughed and the girls groaned but most importantly Mrs. Novey was laughing, in fact, she was face down on her desk laughing. This just prompted another joke from Dean.

“What’s worst than a pile of dead babies?” Dean asked.

“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Novey.

“One in the middle eating its way out”

That got universal groans followed by adolescent male titters. Mrs. Novey groaned with a smile and got up to pass out her math assignments for us. We learned that Dean had dozens of Dead Baby jokes at lunch. More were passed along in the coming weeks and the rest of the year.

Another series of jokes going around that year was ‘Mommy, Mommy‘ jokes, which had nothing to do with Dead Baby jokes. They typically went like this:

Mommy, Mommy! I don’t want to play with grandma!
Shut up and keep digging!

Mommy, Mommy! I don’t wanna go to Europe!
Shut up and keep swimming!

After the first few days of Dead Baby and Mommy Mommy jokes, the goal was to find new ones. My kids were shocked to learn how old Dead Baby jokes were when Dead Baby jokes started circulating around in their school. One of my favorites of theirs…

How do you get 100 dead babies in a bathtub?
A blender
How do you get them out?
a straw

I will give my kids’ generation credit for Chuck Norris jokes. These basically place Chuck Norris in a god-like reverence. A couple of my favorites were…

Chuck Norris doesn’t cut his grass, he sits on his porch and dares it to grow.

Chuck Norris doesn’t wear Superman pajamas. Superman wears Chuck Norris pajamas.

Chuck Norris was once bitten by a poisonous snake. And after many days of agony, the snake finally died.

In a cosmic full circle, Naomi had a pregnant teacher in grade school, around the time that Dead Baby and Chuck Norris jokes were going around in her school. All the kids in this teacher’s class referred to her baby as Chuck.

I remember one specific joke in 8th grade told by Todd Combs. Todd was just a 7th grader who lived down the street from me. We met fishing on Lake Eleanor, despite the fact that his family didn’t live on the lake. Technically that was against the Lake rules. But he was a nice kid and liked fishing. Talking his way into fishing on the Lake was telling of Todd’s personality. So despite being Dave and Jim’s age, Todd and I became friends. Eventually, he would join Dave, Jim and I as we went to school – riding our bikes as weather permitted and walking in the winter. In the middle of the winter, we would cut across the lake. It wasn’t unusual for us to walk to school together but we didn’t always walk back together.

At the end of the day one winter, Todd showed up at my locker to walk home. As I got my jacket on for the walk home he asked me if I wanted to hear the Purple Gorilla joke. Sure – Todd was good with jokes. He starts telling the joke, or rather the story, as I’m putting on my hat and gloves. 25 minutes later we are standing on the bay of Lake Eleanor where we split to go to our homes – and he is still telling this story! When it finally finished all I could do is groan. You can read a shorter version here.

Junior high wasn’t all just jokes. One of the worse moments was having to strip naked and take a shower with 30 other guys. Everyone was embarrassed and yet Mr. Laarveld shooed all of us into the showers. Fat kids hate being naked in general. At 12 years old no one saw me naked anymore except my doctor – and apparently 30 other naked boys and 30-year-old gym teacher. And there was that one jerky Life Guard at Mitchell pool that insisted we take a ‘nude soapy’ shower before letting us through the locker room to the pool area.

Looking back I guess the naked shower in Junior High is a rite of passage in Junior Highs across the country. In high school, it was less traumatic because the ground had been broken in junior high. By then the levels of puberty were more consistent among us. Years later I was never worried walking around the health club naked. As I got older, I really didn’t care what people thought – I just wanted a shower to get the stink off.

The absolute worst moment was throwing up in Mr. Frazin’s 8th-grade math class. It was right after lunch and everything was fine – then suddenly it wasn’t. I wasn’t the type of kid that would have to leave to go to the bathroom. I could hold it. Heaven forbid if you actually took a crap at school. I had no stomach issues, except when I had the flu.

But this particular afternoon, as I sat in Mr. Frazin’s class right after lunch, my stomach started somersaulting.  As I do with any illness, I willed it to pass. I focused on keeping my stomach from its gymnastic tricks. Steady, steady, and then nope – suddenly vomit raged up. Despite my efforts to hold it in with my hands, it gushed out between my fingers and onto my desk, and my notebook, and my lap.

I don’t remember the kids’ reaction. Just the unreality of what had just happened. But I did hear Mr. Frazin say, “Go to the nurse’s office.”

And then he added, “and tell them to send the janitor here.”

Dripping and smelling like vomit, I went for the first time to see the nurse in the front office. She called Aunt Joyce. I was picked up and brought home. The stupid part was I felt fine after that. Clearly, something wasn’t right with my lunch. I always blamed the cantaloupe, but no one else in the family seemed to have a problem with it.

The next day was the real challenge. How would kids react to the new kid throwing up in class? There were a few ‘Puke boy’s and ‘What’s Up Chuck’s but honestly, it could have been much worse. After a few weeks, my ‘puking’ episode had all but faded, it seemed a little too convenient. It could have been that junior high kids have short attention spans but I always suspected a conversation was had with the class for my benefit.

Junior High kids are known for doing stupid things. I remember at the end of one day in 7th grade, Jon Sabath was trying to hit the tips of his fingers with his comb. He had heard that if you prick the ends of your fingers and swing your arm around, blood would spray out the ends. Unfortunately, Jon’s comb was not very sharp.

But fortunately for Jon, Dean Smith offered to help. All Jon really needed was a little more force. So Dean took Jon’s comb and as hard as he could, he wailed on Jon’s fingers tips like the comb was a 6-inch machete. We all saw Jon’s pain through his reaction. But as he tried to smother the pain in his mouth Dean shouted, “Now swing your arms around!” After all, that was the point of all this.

Sure enough, little droplets of blood speckled the ceiling tiles above us. All the gathered 7th-grade boys congratulated Jon on his successful blood splatter as he wrapped his fingers in tissue to stop the bleeding.

The lunchroom was always a hive of energy. The loud buzz of adolescent conversation with accents of laughter, screams and howls. The overall buzz would grow in volume after the food was consumed, which was a clear sign to release the animals into the yard. The first step was to stifle the din so the release could be coordinated; and any necessary announcements that needed to be made.

I remember one afternoon in 8th grade when they announced we could no longer have chicken fights during recess or risk detention. Obviously, someone forgot the first rule of Chicken Fights – you don’t talk about Chicken Fights. OK, maybe some of the teachers saw us holding one another on their backs trying to push each other over. We weren’t exactly hiding what we were doing. We were just having fun. And, of course, it’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt.

Junior high school kids aren’t always the best behaved. And unfortunately, substitute teachers bore the brunt of this. Something about that temporary teacher brought out the worse in some of us. Kids, in general, like to see what they can get away with. So one day in Mrs. Ivy’s homework and we had a sub. The sub had just finished taking attendance when Tracy Calderie walked in.

“And you are…?” she asked.

“Bob Yancy,” Tracy said. The whole class snickered but the sub did not let on that anything was wrong. “Bob” took his seat on the opposite end of the room from the door as the sub dutifully check his name off the attendance list.

A few minutes later Bob walks in.

“And you are…?” she asks again.

“Tracy Calderie,” Bob says.

Again, the whole class snickered while ‘Tracy’ took his seat right by the door.  But the sub had her attendance list all checked off so everything was fine. This was until someone from the front office knocked on the wall and said, “Excuse me, I need Tracy Calderie to come with me. ”

Now the class cracked up as the sub pointed toward the door while “Bob” stood up in the opposite corner. Best prank bust I had ever seen.

On another Fall afternoon, a month or so after school started in 8th Grade, I was in Mrs. Ivy’s homeroom waiting for the final bell. Earlier that summer I had started collecting Famous Monster magazines. So far I had accumulated 4 magazines. This particular afternoon I had brought them to school so my friends could check them out. A group of us were in the back of the room getting our fill of “Food of the Gods”, “Futureland” and “Space 1999”.

Mr. Camporeale, our Social Studies teacher, would occasionally cut through Mrs. Ivy’s room to get to his room next door. He looked a lot like Mr. Kotter from “Welcome Back, Kotter.”

As he walked passed one of my friends looking at my magazine, he stopped. Grabbed the magazine and flipped it to look at the cover.

“This yours?” he asked.

“No, its Zilligen’s,” he said. Thanks, I couldn’t have been sold out faster if I were a free umbrella in a downpour.

“You got more of these?” he asked.

“Just these four,” I answered. Crap, I had just started collecting these and now they were going to be taken away.

“You know,” Mr. Camporeale said as he grabbed the magazine from my friend casually flipping through it. “I used to buy these when I was a kid. In fact, I have #1”

He had #1? That was worth $500! They didn’t even sell that one in the magazine anymore.

“Where do you get these?”

“In the magazine store in the Commons.” The Commons was a strip mall in downtown Deerfield.

“Can you get me the next issue when you pick one up.”

“Sure,” I said.

So the following month when the new issue arrived I picked up two. The next morning I delivered it to Mr. Camporeale’s room.

“You know,” he said. “Every Halloween I bring my monster magazines in. You can look at them when I do.”

“Including #1?”

“Yep”

Halloween was only a couple of weeks away. And true to his word, when we had Social Studies on Halloween, Mr. Camporeale’s desk was piled with Famous Monster magazines.

From behind his desk, Mr. Camporeale started his class by saying, “When I was a kid, I used to buy Monster magazines. My mom said they would rot my brain but I bought them anyway. So – every year for Halloween, I bring them in to show you kids, that what you read will not rot your brains.”

“OK Zilligen, come up here.”

Uh oh, as much as I wanted to see #1, I didn’t want to be called out in front of everyone. On the other side, it was now no secret that I was now Mr. Camporeale’s supplier, of Famous Monster magazines. I was feeling a bit dirty; dirty about being a teacher’s pet.

“Come on, you know you want to see these.”

Slowly I got up and made my way to his desk.

“That, my friend, is the first issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland.”

Sure enough, on the top of the furthest pile was the first issue – worth a cool $500! The most expensive magazine ever! As I was looking at the 40 or 50 magazines, Mr. Camperelli said, “Go ahead, Zilligen. You can touch it.”

I reached out for the magazine but instead I grabbed it and ran back to my desk.

“Hey, Zilligen! Put that back!” Mr. Camperelli yelled. The class laughed their support of my theft.

So I got up and started to put it back.

“Nah, you can go ahead and look it,” he said. “In fact, each of you can come up and take a look at them as I go through today’s lesson. And this WILL be on Friday’s quiz!” he warned.

During his lesson, I flipped through Mr. Camporeale’s #1. I was horrified to see there were pieces of the magazine cut out. It certainly wasn’t worth $500, in fact, the cover was coming off. I bet it was only worth $450, maybe $475.

For the rest of that year, each month I dropped off his copy. He was definitely my favorite teacher that year, despite the fact that I didn’t really care for social studies.

Another Mr. Camporeale story: Unsurprisingly, it turned out Mr. Camporeale was also a movie buff. So it was not unusual for him to supplement his lessons with movies. For kids, this will typically get you on the favorite teacher list.

Now – in 1977 we were told that Drugs were bad. In fact, It turned out drugs were so bad, the teachers in Wilmot Junior High spent an entire week telling us how bad drugs were for us. Having to fill up an entire week it seemed like they found were starting to run out of ways to tell us that drugs were bad for you. This is before Ronald Reagan declared war on Drugs.

The message accumulated in an anti-drug movie shown to us in the lunchroom on a Friday afternoon. It was announced that this movie was rated ‘R’ but we were supposed to pay attention to the message being sent. Once again, for those of us not paying attention earlier in the week – Drugs Are BAD!

For the movie, I was sitting at a table behind the movie projector. Mr. Roeing, my Science teacher, was sitting next to the projector and Mr. Camporeale was next to him. The movie was about a nice girl who turned to drugs and went bad. Toward the end of the movie the now ‘bad girl’ was living with her drug-selling boyfriend. When her dad confronts them in their apartment, the boyfriend gets out of bed, he’s naked. So is the girl.

Suddenly, the film went out of focus. I looked at the project saw Mr. Roeing’s hand on the lens of the projector. I saw Mr. Camporeale look over and hit Mr. Roeing as the two of them animated their best Abbott and Costello routine. His body language said, “What are you doing?”

The movie came back into focus just as the girl got out of bed. Mr. Camporeale made alot of Junior High boys very happy that day.

While Mr. Roeing may have been a bit prudish, he was a fun science teacher. He would encourage students to try things on their own. I remember me and my lab partner were making up a lab – it was either during lunch or after school. Dean Smith had taken Mr. Roeing up on some extracurricular lab work so he was in the lab as well – working on his side project: ‘Contact Fly Paper’.

The concept had a great ‘wow’ factor. Earlier Dean had mixed the chemicals and passed the mixture through a filter. The filter had been drying. Dean was walking passed us gingerly carrying a brownish yellow circle of paper when I asked him what he was working on. Dean explained that the ‘Contact Fly Paper’ would explode when the fly landed on it. He sounded like Peter Brady describing his volcano project. I thought the fact that he was carrying it already proved it wasn’t going work. But just as we got back to our lab we heard a loud “Pop!”

Dean was just at the door a part of the brown paper was floating to the ground. Dean’s hand was now the same color as the filter had been. Son of a bitch – I guess it did work!

In Junior High, us kids were all trying to find our social circles. Mayim Bialik from Big Bang Theory described the difference between Nerds and Geeks – Nerds maintained an interest regardless of the social implications, while the Geeks maintain an interest because of the social group. In Junior High, these social circles were in constant rotation and development. And as we got older these social groups would be increasingly more important to us. The older the ‘social circle’ was, the less ‘geeky’ it was. Also, the more overall acceptance of the ‘social circle’ by society at large, then it was viewed as less ‘geeky’.

The largest and oldest of these circles were Boys and Girls/Dating. As much as I wanted to play in that game, it would still be years for me, I was much too shy. Sports was another group I was not involved with. While Dating andSports were well beyond the ‘Geeky’ label – as described by Mayim – this is because it is so universally accepted. ‘Geeky’ is used for less mainstream interests.

Music, on the other hand, had a wide range of ‘Geekiness’. It was typically based on bands you wanted to follow. The Beach Boys definitely leaned on the nerdy side, while Peter Frampton was the mainstream side. For me, Monster Magazines put me on the ‘nerd’ chart. While there were other kids interested in monsters, we were mostly on the nerdy side. Pop-can collecting – nerdville. My plants, still nerdville – though cactus helped a little. Unfortunately as basic as stamp collecting was, for most Junior High kids, that started me running for various offices in nerdville.

Fads are quick popular things and activities that attracted alot of people. These would also fuel more socials circles. Some of the fads we experienced back then were mood rings, more in 7th grade. Back then everyone had to have a mood ring on display so we could tell if you were ‘calm’ or ‘angry’ or ‘catatonic’.

Bubble Yum and Pop Rocks became a crazy in 8th grade. Anyone that had connections to someone on the East Coast that could send packages of Bubble Yum was a King/Queen at Wilmot for 24-48 hours. Kiss also came on strong in 8th grade. While I was no artist, I was able to draw the faces of Ace, Gene, Paul and Peter – the members of Kiss. I did a good enough job to get a couple of commission pieces (which I think amounted to a couple of ‘Thank you’s). My cousin John had the Destroyer and Rock’n’Roll Over albums which I borrowed as I tried to work my way into that cool music scene. My obsession with Kiss lasted about two weeks. It basically ended when John and I got into an argument and John wouldn’t let me listen to his Kiss albums anymore (and he had just gotten The Originals collection – their first 3 albums). After another week of grumbling, I simply went back to my Beach Boys – which was #1 on the radio in nerdville.

As I said, I would never consider myself artistic, but I would rate my Kiss portraits above average. On the other end of the spectrum, I also tried to introduce 8th grade’s Team I to Beatleman. Beatleman was a drawing I learned from one of two guys who started a cactus store in the Deerfield Commons the summer of ’76. The two owners named their store Quetzalcoatl, after the Aztec Sun God – that turned out to be wrong. All they sold were cactus – that also turned out to be wrong. By the Fall they started selling regular house plants too because they found out the Deerfield market for cactus was already saturated by the colored Moon Cactus that Jewel was selling in their florist department.

The store was an odd building in the northeast corner of the Commons’ parking lot. In the summer they would put cactus outside to attract customers. Instead, they attracted two nerdy Junior High boys – John and I. The inside was white stucco with a brick floor. It smelled like dried potting soil. I was in heaven.

Any time Aunt Joyce or Uncle Jack would go to the Commons we would visit their store. After mowing Grandma’s lawn, we would stop by their store. John and I so became friends with the owners. We rarely bought anything because they never carried smaller plants. The owners put up with me and John.  I would dare say we may have been friends.

I don’t remember their names but during one of our visits, the clean-shaven owner drew me a Beatleman. It was something he had made up when he was a kid (probably 5 or 6 years ago). He had specific rules on drawing Beatleman – the smile was uneven, one tooth was always bigger and he had 3 hairs on the top of his head. After he taught me, he had me practice it. It felt very important. I decided this was the image I was going to plant at Wilmot Jr. High. Whenever I could, I would draw one on the chalkboard or leave a scrap paper with a Beatleman in one of the classrooms or in the hallway. I imagined everybody going “who is the Beatleman?” “Here’s another one!” “Who keeps drawing this?” Soon there would be other people doing it. It would be the strange little face that would get swept up like the Bicentennial fervor we were already going through.

The results were predictable. Outside of one or two “what is this?”s Beatleman was unceremoniously erased or throw away. Outside of a few friends, he was gone in 3 or 4 weeks. He never reached the level of ‘Kilroy‘ or the Smiley Face. And after a year, the same fate followed the Quetzalcoatl cactus store. The owners sold what plants they could and closed up shop the following summer. Only Beatleman survived with his trusty sidekick Waba.

But before my Jr. High career ended, the Eagles would release “New Kid in Town,” just in time for Christmas in 1976. By that time my new kid smell was pretty much worn off. I still related to being the new kid despite the fact that I was beginning to find my way through the social circles and their traps that we were all maneuvering through. No, I wasn’t hanging out at kids houses regularly. In fact, I would say I had only 2 or 3 kids I would call a good friend. Back then I was just trying to get through school so I could get back home. Back to fishing, my plants, my pop cans, and my stamps.  The song spoke of romance but at that age, the closest I was getting was the occasional glance at a pretty girl.

Don Henley and Glenn Frey’s lyrics captured our need to belong which seemed so important in Junior High. “There’s a new kid in town, Everybody’s talking, There’s a new kid in town, People started walking.” In the song the ‘New Kid’ took the singer’s girlfriend. The singer said everybody wanted to be like him. While the ‘New Kid’ was romantic – I was anything but. I was hoping someday to have a girlfriend but that was still years away. For now, I was happy having a few friends and finding my way as a new teenager. Losing 50 pounds lessened the teasing. Gaining my nickname ‘Waba’ would benefit me for many years to come, and in ways I could never anticipate. But no one was doing what I was doing.

Finding my way through the social labyrinths of Wilmot made moving to Deerfield more comfortable and made leaving my past behind easier. There were good times. Those I would like to repeat. But there were many turns and traps back then that left many bruises and heartaches. Being 12 and 13 years old was a tough age but it was survivable. I will just cherish the memories I have, that now have been time has polished them to reflect the sparkle of memories. I will leave this to remind myself what it was like to be the new kid at Wilmot Jr. High.

Dave and I met Grandma after we moved in with the Beckmans. Obviously not our grandma but nor was she John and Jim’s grandma on Uncle Jack’s side. Mary Welch was a friend of Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack’s after they got married. They lived in an apartment next door to John and Mary Welch. The four became good friends despite their age difference. John Welch was postmaster of Deerfield and Mary Welch worked at Lighting Products, a company on the outskirts of Waukegan that made lighting fixtures. They did not have children of their own. After John Welch passed away from a heart attack, Mary Welch adopted John and Jim as her grandchildren. The Beckmans, in return, adopted her as Grandma.

When I first met Grandma she reminded me of Etta, a great aunt that lived with Grandma & Grandpa on my Dad’s side. But this Grandma was actually the complete opposite. Etta was a sister of my grandma or grandpa. She lived with them but we never actually interacted with her. She was an older and scarier version of my Grandma. John and Jim’s Grandma was very nice, wonderful, lovely, beautiful. I don’t remember exactly when I met her but she would occasionally come over for dinner, especially holidays. She was also John and Jim’s babysitter. Dave and I no longer needed a babysitter. She wasn’t so much a babysitter for John and Jim as she would play a referee.

Within the first week, Dave and I learned that besides cutting the lawn at Aunt Joyce and Uncle’s house, we also would cut Grandma’s lawn. The real trick was getting the Beckman’s lawnmower over to Grandma’s – she didn’t own one. Since they only had one car, one of us would go with Uncle Jack the evening before and drop the lawnmower off in her garage. There was plenty of room in the garage. Grandma didn’t own a car either.

John, Jim and Aunt Joyce showed Dave and I the path to take as we rode our bikes to Grandma’s. It was a zig-zaggy path that we would pick-up at Wilmot Road. From there we would cut through Woodland Elementary, Dave and Jim’s school, turn left onto Greenwood, a right on Broadway, left onto Somerset, a right onto Prairie, which was just fields at the time, left onto Hazel for a bit before taking a right onto Forest which sloped downward, to our left to Walnut finally taking a right onto Chestnut. We would cross at the light on Deerfield Road to Grandma’s house which was on the southeast corner of the intersection. There were other ways to get there but they would be the wrong way. We would try these ‘other ways’ as the four of us would sometimes race to get there.

The general rule with mowing was everyone did a bag. Mowing a lawn without collecting the grass was considered uncouth. My Dad never collected the grass. This same process was followed both at home and at Grandma’s. The process of cutting the lawn at Grandma’s was pretty much the same – we would park our bikes on her driveway and knock on her backdoor to say we were there to cut her lawn. One of us would start, by the time we had each done a bag full, Grandma would have come out with a soda for each of us. Many times her lawn would only take a bag each. Aunt Joyce would weed or plant flowers depending on the season, or talk with Grandma about Lighting Products. Aunt Joyce used to work there with Grandma.

I loved talking Grandma about plants and she was a great listener. She had a flower garden on the east part of her property that we would walk through together pointing out how the various plants were doing. Plants were something Grandma and I could bond over. Every holiday she would send the most beautiful flower arrangements from the Deerfield Blossom Shop. We would be eager to show her interesting flowers the Blossom Shop would use in her arrangements when she would come over for the holiday meal.

One of my worse memory after moving in the Beckmans occurred during one of our lawn cutting sessions. There were two parkways we would need to cut, one on Chestnut and one on Deerfield Road. The one on Deerfield Road was tricky. Besides the big oak or walnut there, Deerfield was a busy road and it was a little nerve racking cutting that first strip right next to the road. The other issue with that the parkway was the water pipe that stuck up by the sidewalk near the driveway and the tree. You had to be careful mowing around it because it stuck up pretty high but not as high as the picture to the right. Unfortunately, during one of my turns mowing at Grandma’s around the water pipe, there was a loud thud. The lawnmower, while still running, rattled like crazy and sounded terrible. I had hit the water pipe with the lawnmower. So I turned it off and got Aunt Joyce. Aunt Joyce went inside and called Uncle Jack at work to let him know what happened. Waiting for Uncle Jack was like waiting for the Hangman.

Uncle Jack arrived at Grandma’s to check out the lawnmower. I started it up and as soon as he heard the engine’s mangled growl and saw it vibrate. “Turn it off!” he yelled. He was pissed.

“Didn’t you see that pipe there?” he yelled.

“Ye-yes,” I stammered. ” I was trying to get close.”

“God Dammit,” he said – one of his favorite curses I would learn.

It was the first time I saw Uncle Jack get angry at me. Needless to say, it would not be the last. Grandma knew I was scared. She could have predicted Uncle Jack’s reaction. Apparently, I had broken a ‘Lawn Boy’, which was a very expensive lawn mower. I didn’t know there were even different types of lawn mowers at the time.

The Lawn Boy was brought into the shop but there was no fixing it. I had broken the drive shaft. The whole lawnmower would have to be replaced. A few weeks later when Grandma was ‘babysitting’ us, she talked to me about the Uncle Jack and the Lawn Boy. She told me to give Uncle Jack time. Everyone knows it was an accident. Once there was a new lawnmower everything will be in the past. Just be careful around that water pipe she warned. I was pretty sure there wouldn’t be a ‘next time’.

Within a few weeks with the new lawnmower, we were cutting the grass at Grandma’s again. With the bag rotations, I ended up doing the parkway with the water pipe. Everyone knew the care I had taken around the water pipe by the long grass I left around the pipe. In the months and years later. There would be comments about being careful and not to break the lawnmower. The sting of the comments faded and eventually turned into jokes. Which I would eventually accept. Cutting the grass at Grandma’s once again became a family activity. And we would take our turns cutting the grass and sitting with Grandma on the stoop, drinking our sodas.

In the winter after a snow storm, we would be driven over to shovel her driveway and sidewalks, mainly so Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack could pull their car into her driveway. Grandma very generous, slipping each of us a few dollars that we would refuse. Then she would force the money into our hands with instructions not to tell Aunt Joyce or Uncle Jack.

That Christmas Dave and I learned just how generous Grandma could be. Underneath the tree that morning were two stereos, one for each bedroom. We were excited to receive such extravagant gifts. These were clearly marked ‘from Grandma’. Each stereo came with 8-track player – the latest in audio quality. So each of us received an 8-track tape. When I was writing this story I ask Dave, Jim and John if they remember what 8-tape they received. None of them could remember. I could never forget, I received The Beach Boy’s ‘Endless Summer’.

As excited as we were to receive the stereos, we were not allowed to start the process of setting up them up since church was merely three hours away and we had to get ready. So Dave and I explored all the contents of the box the stereo came in. On the way to and from church, I read the pamphlet that accompanied our stereo so I would be prepared to set it up when we got home.

We picked up Grandma from her church, she was a devout Catholic and went to Holy Cross in Deerfield off Waukegan Road. We were Lutheran and went to Zion Lutheran Church on Deerfield Road. Holy Cross was on the way home for us. This was a pretty normal routine for the holidays – picking Grandma up on the way home to spend time and share a holiday meal. This year, we boys, thanked her profusely for the new stereos. And when we got home, we piled out of the car, we ran to our bedrooms to change and began setting up our stereos to show them off to her. Dave and I needed shelves to put our speakers on since there was nowhere else in our room to put them. For the time being, we propped them up on each of our beds. Grandma came to each room and properly admired the gifts she had given us. So John and Jim had the radio playing our of theirs. It would be a number of months before I realized Dave and I needed to connect the power cord to the radio antenna ground post to get FM stations so Dave and I did could not get the FM radio to work that morning. So instead of the radio, we soon had ‘Surfin’ Safari’ playing from the speakers. Soon a ‘stereo war’ broke out as Dave and I challenged Jim and John. Grandma stood in the hallway cringing and Aunt Joyce came down laughing as we tried to outdo each other. Uncle Jack yelled at us to turn them down and warned that future infractions would have appropriate punishments.

Later that afternoon after Christmas dinner, Grandma’s generosity continued as she presented us with another gift, a gift certificate for Deerfield Record Shop so we could get another 8-track, an album or more 45’s. Unfortunately, Grandma, with Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack did not know what they had released in me with this introduction to the world of music. It would turn out to be a lifetime interest, collecting albums, making social connections and, for a little while, a career that revolved around music. While we were already buying 45’s, 8-tracks brought me closer to my future obsession.

At the time, 8-track tapes offered a higher quality for music and the convenience to allow people to bring their music with them for the first time. 8-Tracks were originally developed Ampex Magnetic Tape Company, Lear Jet Company and RCA Records but embraced by Ford Motors in the Fall of 1965. Ford started offering 8-track stereo in all their cars. It knocked out the original 4-track tape but those were only available in California. By the time we had received our stereos from Grandma, 8-Tracks were at their peak. While cassette tapes were already available for recording purposes, they were deemed inferior to 8-tapes due to their low fidelity.

The technology of 8-tracks was great. OK, not really. First, there was the annoying ‘click-CLUNK’ when the player switched from one program to the next. A program was a collection of songs on the album. There were 4 programs per 8-track and two tracks for each song (left and right track) which is why they were called ‘8-tracks’. Typically two programs would make up one side of an album. As we got more 8-tracks, we would learn that sometimes to avoid long periods of silence at the end of a program, the record company would split the song over two programs. So in the middle of the song, it would fade out, click to the next program and fade back in. That was annoying.

‘Endless Summer’ introduced me to not only The Beach Boys but to fandom. A few weeks later I would declare myself a Beach Boys fan. Endless Summer was originally released June of ’74. It was a brilliant move on Micheal Love’s part, the current leader of the Beach Boys. ‘Endless Summer’ spent almost 3 years on the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart. But it was not only MY introduction to The Beach Boys but also for millions of young people who had not heard of them since their fade from the music scene which began in 1967. In 1967, they rivaled The Beatles for the top of the music scene. The ‘Endless Summer’ double album greatest hits was a perfect 8-track that hid the fading problems of 8-track tapes during the height of their popularity. It was a perfect album to take advantage of 8-track’s portability.

‘Endless Summer’ set a pattern on how I would listen to music in the coming years. My sister Hope taught me how to shuffle and bridge cards. So I would perfect my shuffling technique while playing solitaire. So as our 8-track collect would grow or the occasional stack of 45’s, I would listen to music while playing solitaire on my bed. Eventually, vinyl records become my primary media format for my listening/solitaire sessions.

The Beach Boys were my first band – Alan Jardine, Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson and Micheal Love. For a young boy, they were like my first girlfriend. I loved anything they did. They opened my eyes to the world around me. They changed how I looked at myself and others. And yes, they would eventually disappoint me. But that was years away and I had a lot to learn. I was an eager student.

‘Endless Summer’ was soon joined with another Beach Boys collection – ‘Spirit of America‘, another double album greatest hits, though more secondary hits. It was from their illustrated portraits on ‘Endless Summer’ that I decided I wanted to grow a beard. They were my first representation of ‘cool’ in band form. The Beatles were right there too but their Red and Blue Greatest Hits were still another year away for Dave and me.

I remember watching an award show one evening and the nominees were ‘The Beatles’, ‘The Rolling Stones’, ‘The Beach Boys’ and ‘The Kinks’. I was actually surprised that The Beach Boys didn’t win – surely The Beatles were not better than The Beach Boys! It showed how biased and how nieve I was about music. I would learn a lot in the years to come. But at the beginning of 1976, The Beach Boys ruled my ears.

Even as I became a Beach Boys fan it was always about their music. I didn’t read much about them. I didn’t really care what they looked like (except most of them had beards). I didn’t know their historical place as a Rock ‘n’ Roll archetype. I enjoyed their music. The more I heard – the more I wanted to hear. I learned their names and understood Brian Wilson was the band’s leader and the true creative force behind The Beach Boys’ success. That summer they released ’15 Big Ones’ and the Chuck Berry cover ‘Rock and Roll Music’ was a huge hit for them.

In 1976 ‘Happy Days‘ was near the top ten for TV shows, making it to #1 the following year. Their theme song,  “Happy Days” written by Norman Gimbel and Charles Fox, was released as a single that year peaking at #5. Another notable oldie released that year was The Beatles’ “Got To Get You Into My Life.” This was The Beatles first single since they broke up 6 years earlier. It was released to promote their ‘Rock and Roll Music‘ compilation. So The Beach Boys were not the only ones riding a wave of nostalgia that year. There was a lot of nostalgia that year as we celebrated America’s Bicentennial.

Today when you think about ‘comeback bands’ – bands that had drifted into obscurity only to reclaim their relevancy – people typically think of Aerosmith and Heart. While The Beach Boys didn’t reclaim their full relevancy, they did become standard fare for the next 20 years for the Summer Concert scene. While this would be a huge success for any band, you have to know that The Beach Boys were once as popular as The Beatles – until the ‘Smile’ album.

While The Beach Boys started out as Brian Wilson’s vocal instruments for surf music, it was soon apparent he wasn’t just any songwriter. Brian Wilson was gifted. Sure he cranked out songs about something The Beach Boys never did – surf (with the exception of Dennis Wilson) and the California culture – at a three album a year pace! But by their ninth album, ‘Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!)‘ (which spawned ‘Help Me, Rhonda‘ and ‘California Girls‘) the music industry was well aware of Brian’s talent. So when he wanted to do something ‘different’ the studio gave him their full support.

The album was ‘Pet Sounds‘. It was a complete departure for The Beach Boys. It was Brian Wilson exploring his ‘In-My-Room’ type of music which he developed while the rest of the band was on tour in Japan. Brian was no longer touring with the band so he could focus on songwriting.  The new album was recorded mostly with studio musicians (know as The Wrecking Crew) with The Beach Boys filling in their vocals when they returned. The album wasn’t well received by the critics or the public. It was a songwriter’s album. In England, however, it was in the top ten for six months. The Beatles and The Who were blown away by what Brian had done. Now ‘Pet Sounds’ is legendary. Some say it inspired The Beatles to make Sgt. Peppers. What it did do is change how artists and the public look at the album format.

Sadly Brian Wilson’s accomplishments would also become The Beach Boys’ albatross. With the late success of ‘Pet Sounds’, Brian would begin their next project – ‘Smile‘. Brian ‘locked’ himself in the studio for over a year (02/17/66 – 05/18/67) working on ‘Smile’; missing the original January release date. One single was released as a teaser – ‘Good Vibrations‘. It was The Beach Boys’ first single to sell a million copies. Anticipation for ‘Smile’ was huge. But the pressure proved to be too much for Brian. The project was eventually scrapped. And when The Beatles released Sgt. Peppers, it would be the nail in ‘Smiles’ coffin – almost. ‘Smile’ was officially released 44 years later. The stories of Brian’s depression and instability in though following years would be on par with Bill Murray but without any of Bill Murray’s charm and playfulness.

With the failure to release ‘Smile’ The Beach Boys would begin to fail. ‘Smile’ was turned into ‘Smiley Smile‘. For four years The Beach Boys albums would fail to chart better than their predecessor, each album peaking lower and lower. Their comeback album ‘Surf’s Up‘ stopped the descent but barely cracked the top 30. But The Beach Boys would return. And while that request would not come from their wives (an ode to the ‘Odd Couple’ sitcom), it did come from Jerry Garcia.

After a classic 3-hour Grateful Dead concert at the Fillmore East in April 1971, The Beach Boys joined The Dead on stage for 7 songs. This was an awkward transition from The Dead to the washed-up Beach Boys but by the end of their set, the crowd was going wild for their familiar California sound. After this impromptu performance, The Beach Boys go off to Holland to record ‘Holland‘ – which doesn’t do well on the charts – but ‘the cool kids’ (ie – Dead Heads) begin to think The Beach Boys are cool again. A few years of VW buses crisscrossing the American concert scenes and The Dead Heads giving high praise to The Beach Boys, and I’m sure a few other things,  a buzz begins -as one would expect.

So sometimes a band has a member that plays the villain. With The Beach Boys, this was Micheal Love, Brian Wilson’s cousin. Michael did not like the direction Brian had taken the band with ‘Pet Sounds’. While Michael Love was a key contributor to The Beach Boys’ lyrics, he was not the creative genius Brian was. Michael was more like his Uncle Murray, the Wilson brother’s dad when it came to business. Michael smelled the buzz during the tour for ‘Holland’ and recorded ‘The Beach Boys In Concert‘ which actually charted better than ‘Surf’s Up’. And it was Micheal Love that put together the ‘Endless Summer’ collection. I thank him for that business intuition. ‘Endless Summer’ introduced me and millions of others to more than just The Beach Boys, for me, ‘Endless Summer’ introduced me to music at a different level.

‘Endless Summer’ was a great collection of Beach Boys hits. Michael Love had alternated between upbeats songs with slow songs on each side or program in 8-track tape terms. All those great Summer songs made me long to see the West Coast. But it was ‘In My Room’ that captured my new sanctuary, a 10 x 10 room that Dave and I shared. With Brian Wilson’s vocal arrangements, ‘In My Room’ it would transport me to another quiet room where palm trees stood outside instead a Russian Olive. A room that was just outside sunshine, the beach and the possibilities of love.

I bought “The Smile Session” in 2011 to see what Brian was actually planning with ‘Smile’. (Brian Wilson actually release his version of ‘Smile’ as “Brian Wilson Presents Smile“, which I also bought.) For Christmas in 2015, I had “The Pet Sounds Sessions” on my Christmas List which Josh got me. It was great insight to those recording sessions.

Let me pause to explain how I listen to my music now since I no longer have an 8-track stereo next to me in my bedroom. Over the years of constantly buying new albums, currently in the compact disc format, I have developed a process on how I listen to my new music. In full disclosure, checking my Amazon account, I purchase about 20-25 albums a year. Until my kids came along I would first listen to a new album when I had time to sit down and focus on the album. I would follow along with anything that came with the album – liner notes, lyrics, etc. I used to say I would get over 50% of my enjoyment from that first listening session.

Until one evening in the basement our home I was in the middle of one of my ‘listening sessions’ – with headphones so I did not disturb my newborn son or my wife, who was working the next morning. Suddenly the overhead light started flashing causing me to take my headphones off. I could now hear Desi informing/yelling at me that our infant son Nate was crying. He had woken Desi up while I was ear-deep into one of my cd’s. I was on dad duty and had failed miserably! So I lost my ‘listening sessions’. I would have to skip directly listening to the album in the car, typically on the way to work. I would record the new CD on to a cassette and listen to the cassette for a week on my commute to work. Once I got a CD player for the car I would not need that extra step of transferring them to cassette. After that week, the album would be moved to be rotated into the CD player in our stereo system that I would typically have played over the weekend. From there they get incorporated into my entire cd collection. I went through this process because to get an intimate appreciation of the music.

So dear reader, call it coincidence, cosmic energy, destiny or the hand of God, I thought I would share this bit of serendipity with you. The year I wrote this story, for my birthday, Desi gave me ‘Made In California‘ a 6-disc Beach Boys box set. When I started writing this story in the beginning of April, there 6 discs were waiting their turn for my daily commute.  As I finish this story the last discs are now playing on the home stereo system.

So to finish this story, 12 year old me, soon to be 13, did not know who The Beach Boys were when I began listening to ‘Endless Summer’. Thus began this journey of musical knowledge. Not just on discovering The Beach Boys but how music would soon encompass my life. But in the early moments, as I sat on my bed playing solitaire, the ‘Endless Summer’ 8-track would click along next to me allowing me to follow Brian Wilson’s muse through his music. Contrary to the lyrics of ‘In My Room’, I did not “lock out all my worries and my fears”, I was actually locking them in. I was working through my real worries and fears, and I had a lot of them. In the darkness ‘My Room’ (actually ‘our room’),  I would ‘lie awake’ and cry and sigh and pray. And despite my brother being 3 feet away, I was alone in these thoughts. And I was afraid. My yesterday was not a laughing matter. But with Brian Wilson’s help, the Beckmans and Mary Welch – Grandma – I learned not to be afraid – ‘In My Room’ or anywhere else.

There’s a world where I can go and tell my secrets to
In my room, in my room
In this world I lock out all my worries and my fears
In my room, in my room

Do my dreaming and my scheming
Lie awake and pray
Do my crying and my sighing
Laugh at yesterday

Now it’s dark and I’m alone
But I won’t be afraid
In my room, in my room
In my room, in my room
In my room, in my room

The song “Rocky” caught me quite unexpectedly. I remember all of us – and ‘all of us’ now consisted of Aunt Joyce, Uncle Jack, my cousins John and Jim, and my brother Dave – were on our way home from somewhere in the middle of the Fall of ’75. For this particular ride home I had luckily drawn a window seat. However, since it was dark out, I couldn’t read, which was how I normally spent my time in the car. I leaned my head against the cool glass listening to the radio.

The bouncy melody caught my ear and the lyrics caught my attention:

Alone until my eighteenth year
We met four springs ago
She was shy and had a fear
Of things she did not know
But we got it on together
In such a super way
We held each other close at night
And traded dreams each day

And she said, “Rocky, I’ve never been in love before
Don’t know if I can do it
But if you let me lean on you
Take my hand, I might get through it” (through it)
I said, “Baby, oh sweet baby
It’s love that sets us free
And God knows if the world should end
Your love is safe with me”

It was a love song. At the time I wasn’t aware of how cheesy the lyrics really were but I was interested in how they ‘got it on together in such a super way’ – well, after all, I was now in 7th grade:

We found an old gray house
And you would not believe the way
We worked at night to fix it up
Took classes in the day
Paintin’ walls and sippin’ wine
Sleepin’ on the floor
With so much love for just two
Soon we found there’d be one more

And she said, “Rocky, I’ve never had a baby before
Don’t know if I can do it
But if you let me lean on you
Take my hand, I might get through it” (through it)
I said, “Baby, oh sweet baby
it’s love that sets us free
And God knows if the world should end
Your love is safe with me”

At this point, this was sounding like a typical love song. The fact that they had a Gray House like Dave and I did was interesting but my attention was beginning to wane:

We had lots of problems then but
We had lots of fun
Like the crazy party
When our baby girl turned one
I was proud and satisfied
Life had so much to give
‘Till the day they told me
That she didn’t have long to live

She said, “Rocky, I’ve never had to die before
Don’t know if I can do it…”

That hit me. I had just been introduced to my first tragedy song. OK, not my first tragedy song – there was Terry Jack’s “Seasons In The Sun”  but this one caught me by surprise. I couldn’t cry because everyone was in the car, but a tear escaped anyways as the lyrics finished:

Now it’s back to two again
The little girl and I
Who looks so much like her sweet mother
Sometimes it makes me cry
I sleep alone at nights again
I walk alone each day
And sometimes when I’m about to give in
I hear her sweet voice say, to me

“Rocky, you know you’ve been alone before
You know that you can do it
But if you’d like to lean on me
Take my hand, I’ll help you through it” (through it)
I said, “Baby, oh sweet baby
It’s love that sets us free
And I told you when the world would end
Your love was safe with me”

She said, “Rocky, you know you’ve been alone before
You know that you can do it
But if you’d like to lean on me…

This story/this song – haunted me for days.  While I still remembered the tragic song ‘Seasons In The Sun’, now I was on the other side of my own tragedy. Everything hit so much closer to home. These characters were now much more believable than they would have been a year ago.

After moving in with Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack, one part of the grieving process I would struggle with forgetting what had happened. There would be mornings I would wake up, realize I was in our new bedroom at Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack’s house. Dave’s bed would be three feet from mine. And that comprehension of being in a new bedroom would fade into that realization that my parents were dead. My grief would reset and the pain of this new reality would dig new footholds.

Prior to this, my only experience with death had been when Skipper, our family collie, had to be put down. Skipper was laid in the outside stairwell after he broke his leg. I remember spending the morning with him crying knowing my Dad would come home and take him away. And when Dad came home, he loaded Skipper into the station wagon. Dad left and came home without Skipper. Skipper was dead, I don’t remember burying him – he just wasn’t home anymore.

When my parents died, I realized I didn’t know how death worked. Mom and Dad were in heaven, right? That’s what everyone said. I would see them again when I went to heaven – when I died. We were to take comfort in that. Wait, that we all die? Everyone dies. No one lives forever. Someday – I would die. When would that be? How would I die? Would it hurt? I didn’t want it to hurt? How long did I have? My brothers and sisters could die. I did not know if I could go through the pain I had been going through these last 9 months again. I did not want to experience that pain again. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t.

Before my parents died I had been reading read ghost stories, and I still did. I ached to see my parents again, especially my mom – even as spirits. For months and years, I would lie in bed in the dark. Dave and I would spend some nights talking – until Aunt Joyce would open the door and tell us, “no more talking, it was time for bed”. It was in this dark quiet I would explore what death was to me.

My thoughts would chase me into the darkest corners of my mind. These nights I would reach out to Mom – mentally, or maybe it spiritually – it was all just in my head. I would lie in bed and think – thinking, stretching with my mind, reaching out – for some kind of sensation, anything, something – trying for some response that wasn’t my own making. I would concentrate harder and harder until my head would ache; reaching further and further. Screaming in my head – “Mom!” My tears would stream down the corners of my eyes onto my pillow as I waited for a response, something — anything. And as my overtures drifted away unanswered into those dark corners, I would fill in what I wanted to hear…

“I will always be with you, Johnny.”

But even as I invoked those words I knew it was a lie I used to fill in the void, the lack of response. I would lie to myself because I could no longer stand the emptiness. I didn’t understand. Why didn’t she respond? What stronger bond was there than a mother and her child? But she didn’t answer. Was there no spiritual world? Did she really no longer exist – even on the spiritual level? Was I really never going to see her again? The questions would start there, run to the empty edges of my mind, spilling into my emptiness. I questioned everything. The world I thought I knew was now gone. I was now testing the spiritual world I was trying to understand and realizing I knew even less about that. After these nights, the next day I would go through life  – day by day – as a kid growing up. But in the darkness of my room, where I could hide my tears, where I would continue to ‘reach out’ I would find nothing – only isolation in a vast void – as my brother slept 3 feet away. As this void gained substance I realized it would hold the weight of my questions. I realized I was not going to hear from Mom, or Dad, and further questions would drift unanswered. And I stopped reaching out.

From this void, this blankness, I built a foundation. I separated life from living. Over time I found that I was going through Life. And in going through Life, I was, in fact, living but Life had lost a lot of its warmth. Grief’s oldest cliche’s turned out to be true – ‘Time heals all wounds’ and ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’.

By the time I had gotten to High School, I had again caught up to my peers – focused on normal things teenagers focused on – girls, music, cars and work. But I knew what most adults didn’t get It, that is – Life, but I also included my peers. It seemed no one understood that Life was a facade. That there was nothing lied beyond what we saw – we are alive and then we died. Heaven was a story you told children and scared adults to ease the pain of those who were left behind. But now I knew, there was nothing after you died.

My questioning of everything allowed me to stand on this void with what I believed was ‘true knowledge’. While my peers who fought the status quo of living, I thought had unlocked what Life really was. I would live in the moment. I removed my future expectations. The problem was if you ran this thought process to the logical conclusion, life had no meaning – you lived and you died. Death was final, no spirit, no afterlife – just the void. One thing that was true was the pain, it was very real. So if the pain was so much then the answer was to end the charade of living. The longing for my brothers and sisters was still very strong. But in that same conclusion, I could never knowingly cause them much pain. And I know too well how much pain death could cause. My suicidal thoughts would echo for years. But slowly they would get trampled to murmurs by the constant stepping through of Life and relearning how to live in this new world.

And while this new enlightenment seemed bleak, there was comfort in understanding. I had matured well beyond my years. This knowledge gave me confidence. In this understanding, I saw things differently, better than most adults – again, so I thought. And while these questions built me up, I shriveled from death and its ultimate coming. I knew how far death could change one’s life without actually ending it. I understood it was just the beginning of a long and possibly overwhelming process. Death would forever have my respect and, unfortunately, my heart.

In this new “living” I learned to ‘play the game’. I did not cause problems. I would not be a burden to others. Knowing there was nothing while others believed there was something (void vs. heaven) allowed me to patience with others. And in this patience I allowed my grief to subside, and I would learn to be comfortable with my new being. But despite going to church, and even starting confirmation classes at Zion Lutheran Church, it would be many years before I understood how Faith worked despite John and I would take confirmation classes together at their church – I mean our church.

When Dave and I moved in with Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack, it was natural that Dave and I paired off with John and Jim since we each had a cousin that was the same age. However, while John and I went to the same confirmation class, I was signed up to attend Wilmot Jr. High that Fall while John was going to Deer Path Middle School in Lake Forest. John had trouble with reading and math and Deer Path could help him get the classes that Wilmot Jr. High did not provide. So we went to separate schools. Dave and Jim, however, went to Woodland Elementary just a few blocks away.

As in any family siblings fight. As Dave and I were integrated into the Beckman family we did more things together. It was great when we played tag or ‘Ghost in the Graveyard. John and Jim taught us ‘Kick the Can’, or we would fish down by the lake, or ride our bikes around the neighborhood. But like any other family, there would be times we did not get along.

One of my first fights with John turned into a real fight with punching and wrestling – just like Dave and I used to do. Strangely, but understandably, Dave and I no longer fought anymore. We no longer had our big punching and wrestling fights anymore as we did before. Regarding this particular fight with John, I don’t remember how it got started or what it was about. I do know it started inside the house and continued as I chased him out to the front yard.

I knew John and Jim had fought because I had seen them. I chased John through the front door and pushed him down as he gained speed across the yard. I had learned from my fights with Dave that if I didn’t get them down early I would never be able to catch them because of my weight. Down he went and I was on top of him punching him in the arms. As with Dave it never seemed right to punch someone in the face.

John was a lot stronger than Dave so he was able to throw me off at first. And in the midst of our tears and punches, John yelled at me, “You’re lucky you have somewhere to live.”

Which I responded with “Yea? well, at least I go to a normal school.”

We had both shocked each other in what we had said. Later that afternoon Aunt Joyce reprimanded me for calling John out on for going to a different school. I complained he started it – which I knew was typically not a good response since adults don’t really care who starts a fight.  I had apparently undone a lot of work Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack had done to get John the help he needed in school. By pointing out the stigma that came with going to a different school from the other kids in the neighborhood I had undermined their efforts.

The bottom line was – it was a crappy thing I did. Yes, so was what he had said. Yes – two wrongs don’t make a right – and you can’t take back what is said. Two years later it was a moot point as John and I both going to Deerfield High School together. But what really happened that day was John and I became brothers. We learned our boundaries and what we were each capable of and how we could hurt each other. Were we inseparable? no. But we both enjoyed going to the Chicago Plant Show as a family in the spring, going to the Botanical Gardens together or that new cactus shop that had opened up in the Commons in downtown Deerfield that next summer. And we always had, and still have, fishing.

We – Dave, Jim, John and I – became ‘The Boys’. While we were introduced as individuals but we were collectively referred to as ‘The Boys’.  John and I tended to be more interested in plants and animals. And John was more into animals, while I more into plants. Dave and Jim tended to be more on the mechanical side with cars and snowmobiles. And we all shared stamp collecting, beer can (or pop can) collecting, swimming, family vacations and watching our favorite TV shows, or listening to our favorite 45’s.

We did a lot of living together. And while I would lie in the dark contemplating Life with its dark edges and its various drop-offs – I was still living. Each day, despite my dark thoughts, I was living a little more. And as I continued to try figure out what this Life – my life – meant,  the Past was being put into the void. Never being forgotten but supporting the weight of my being – and my understanding who I was.

Later I realized this was a good thing. I was beginning to forget; so I guess that’s also a bad thing. Life was moving on. The tidal waves that had swept away my previous life were now just memories; strong and life-changing but becoming only memories. My dead parents were being left to the darkness of my late night thoughts and wet pillows. All the lives touched by that tidal February night had changed. The Zilligen children tumbled behind in it’s wake. Sometimes we couldn’t breathe. Sometimes we were dead weight. But we learned to keep up with the lives that surrounded us.

We fought the weight of pain that pushed us underneath a life we used to know, threating to bury us with grief. I did lose part of a brother and some of my sisters. But within one of my efforts back to the surface of the living, I would find four more sets of arms pulling me along. Only in looking back would I learn that I had gained two more brothers and new parents. The tidal waves of life are always destructive. Up close death was way more devastating than anything I could have imagined. But I learned it was not insurmountable. Only time could calculate the loss and the lessons learned. ‘Rocky’ pushed me down the real path of death, not the flowery archangels of death, but its cold reality. Now I understood “Now it’s back to two again.” Dave and I against this new life. Thank God we had to a Life to live through. The pain did subside. And when we awoke, it was in the arms of a new family.

Moving in with Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack was horrible – which had nothing to do with them. It was the circumstances of WHY we had to move. In fact, with the hindsight of forty years, it was probably the best thing that could have happened to eleven and twelve-year-old orphaned boys.

That weekend Uncle Jack had borrowed a pickup truck to move all Dave and mine’s worldly possessions to their house. The truck rolled passed Deerfield’s Mitchell Pool that Friday evening with John, Jim, Dave and I hanging our elbows out the back gate. John and Jim point out the pool and how much fun it was. I did not realize how much of a role that community pool would play two or three summers and how it would help in my healing process.

John & Jim are my cousins so it wasn’t like I didn’t know them. But living with someone is very different than just seeing them at family get-togethers two or three times a year. Our move had caused a kink in John and Jim’s living arrangements – they had just gotten their own rooms and now they had to go back to being in the same room. The furniture arrangements in Dave and my bedroom was tight. There wereabout two feet between our beds, four feet from the foot of the beds to the closets and just a foot between our dresser and my bed. Needless to say, we didn’t spend a lot of time in our bedroom.

One of the first things we did as new members of the Beckman family was to get our pool passes. Because Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack lived outside of the Village of Deerfield, the pool passes were more expensive. Dave and I never had a pool pass before. I remember once going to the Des Plaines Public pool. It was a little unnerving seeing so many people piled into the water. I wasn’t sure how this whole Pool Pass thing was going to work out. John and Jim told me their pool was great and they loved hanging out there. So we were hauled off to the community center in downtown Deerfield, each dutifully sitting for our picture which would eventually end up in a hard plastic laminated card that we would pin to our beach towels.

The next thing we needed were goggles. Lee had a face mask, that I rarely got to use. These were not allowed in Deerfield’s community swimming pool – goggles, however, were. I had never seen googles before. They were a pair of small plastic lens that were strung together with a flat piece of rubber that was adjustable.

The few times I had been in a pool, opening your eyes underwater was a challenge we would issue to each other. The downside of winning that challenge was that the chlorine would turn your eyes redder and redder with each glimpse. Goggles solved this problem and, as it turned out, were pretty normal at public pools.  In fact, tinted and colored lens turned them into fashion statements.

Once we were properly equipped, John, Jim and Aunt Joyce took Dave and I for our first swim. We dutifully showed our new pool passes to the high school or college girl behind the open window. She returned the favor by counting us with her clicker. John and Jim took us through the mens locker room. Despite the signs, we didn’t take a ‘nude soapy shower’ but the life guard manning the locker room made sure we showered enough to get our hair wet before we met Aunt Joyce outside by the pool.

It was a bright warm June day as Dave and I were led to the lounge chairs in the northwest corner of the fenced in pool area. We each picked a lounger with our towels while Jim threw his towel on one and ran to the pool – only to be called back by Aunt Joyce.

“Suntan lotion?” she questioned already knowing the answer. Dutifully we all formed a line behind John, applying what we could to ourselves and helping each other. Once we were properly covered we were allowed to escape into the pool.

In June of 1975, I was close to 200 pounds. I was never comfortable in a swimming suit  but once I got in the water I was part fish. As a dinosaur enthusiast, I thought, like a brontosaurus, spending a lot of time in the water would help support my weight, and it did. I felt much more comfortable hiding in the water so others could not see my flabby body.

Mitchell Pool became a sanctuary for me. Once I was in the water I was very comfortable – swimming anywhere and everywhere. Dave, Jim, John and I would goof around playing Marco Polo, diving for things on the bottom of the pool and spend the entire afternoon swimming and playing around in the water – you know, being kids. Sometimes we would even go back after supper and stay until closing. By August it would start to get dark by 8:30 and the pool was lit with plate sized lights that we could explore with our goggles.

There was one thing the kids at Mitchel Pool had to deal with, as did most kids of public pools – the Adult Swim. Every hour, for 10 minutes, they would have Adult Swim. This meant the life guards would blow their whistles and anyone 17 or younger would have to leave. This left the entire pool to the two or three adults who, I always thought, felt obligated to swim a lap or two to justify kicking all the kids out. We would wander back to our saved loungers, dry off and wait out the 10 minutes. I always had a book I was reading so I would pick that up and read through Adult Swim. That summer I was beginning to shift from my ghost stories to science fiction, specifically Ray Bradbury’s short story books. Sometimes when the life guards would whistle that Adult Swim was over, I would be too engrossed in a story to leave it and sometimes read straight through to the next swimming session.

That summer I learned that I loved the water. But not just the water, but the entire atmosphere at Mitchel Pool. When I wasn’t swimming along the bottom looking for things with the clarity my new goggles offered me; I would be reading one of my books on the yellow loungers; or maybe just hanging on the side of the pool – taking in the great sunshine like one of my cactuses – except without all the water. I remember the warm afternoon summer sun heating the concrete to near sometimes painful levels.

Most days Aunt Joyce would drop us off after lunch and then pick us up sometime after the pool closed for an hour for dinner; or Uncle Jack would pick us up on his way home from work. We’d come home, eat and sometimes go right back to the pool. I remember a number of times after the pool would close for dinner we would start walking home barefooted trying to avoid rocks and pebbles on the sidewalk. And there was that occasion when we would see the family station wagon coming down Wilmot road from the house. Aunt Joyce or Uncle Jack would wave to their barefooted gang and turn around to pick us up. And as they pulled up over to the curb, we would never miss the chance to put our thumbs out like we were hitchhiking – because we were cool that way.

Mitchell was my home away from home – which was a home away from my last home with my parents. It became a comfortable place to me myself – like trying to get through the shower area without taking the nude shower. The protective 8 foot fenced in yard that herded us along with the yellow plastic webbed loungers that were scattered on that concrete; many claimed with towels, bags and mothers. I would spend carefree days swimming, reading and just hanging out, trying to sneak glimpses at the pretty girls in their bathing suits, or watching the lifeguards in their chairs who were watching me. I would watch the bravado play out with the kids in line for the high dive. And most of all, I spent a lot of time listening to radio they played in the pool area.

The radio at the pool was rigged to play through probably the worse set of speakers I ever heard. While I was only 12 even I knew they sounded horrible. Back when WLS was king of the AM station in Chicago. The lifeguards would tune in WLS on their radio in their office. While the signal may have come in crystal clear in the office, by the time it got to the megaphone speakers placed around the pool area, it sounded more like it had been funneled through a kazoo rather than the current electronic wizardry available in 1975. But after a few hours, you got used to the wax paper rattle and you could actually make out the music that was being played.

This was way before walkmans and VCR’s. This was the land of Hi-Fi and Polaroids. This is looking from an old man remembering his carefree childhood days – before his responsibilities, before jobs, before girls, before commitments and obligations. As a kid, I was at a point I just wanted to ‘be’, to exist – to be happy – and to forget. That summer, the past winter seemed like a lifetime away but the reality was as bright as that summer’s sun. During my time at the pool my mind would wander, it would many times wander to the darker corners of my mind and I didn’t like that. There was a twisting and trapped feeling that I was trying to avoid. The Summer of ’75 at Mitchel Pool offered me the brightness, the sunshine, a childhood and, dare I say – the happiness – I was so desperate to find.

With my original family, we listened to music sporadically – in the car, the occasional ’45 sessions’ or through the clock radio. But for the first time, I experienced being someplace where the radio played continuously for 6 hours or more. I would hear songs over and over. And I would get happy when a favorite song would come on. And I found out I had a lot of favorite songs.

I would be hanging on the side of the pool listening to the DJ’s on WLS as they introduced the next summer hit. I would sing along to the sad story of the girl and her dead pony when Michael Murphy sang “Wildfire”; or fantasize about being in love with Pilot’s “Magic”; or try to imagine what it would be like to have a girl fighting for my attention like the guy in Captain and Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together”, or the heartbreaking loss if someone played B-17 during Olivia Newton John’s “Please, Mr. Please” hit; or the strength I felt from Glen Campbell as he taught me to smile through the pain in “Rhinestone Cowboy.” And whenever I heard “The Hustle,” I always wondered how the hell K-Tel could sell one album with 20 hits for only $4.99! and that included shipping and handling.

One of those stand out songs for me was Wings, “Listen To What The Man Said”.” I didn’t know who Wings were but I might have been able to pick Paul McCartney out of a lineup if I was forced to back then. From the lively guitar strumming and the alto sax solo that would cut through even those horrible pool speakers the intro would start my foot tapping. If it was the sax solo that told me the song was coming, the lyrics “Soldier boy kisses his girl, leaves behind a tragic world” locked me into the next three minutes. It was a great song but not only because it was part of those great summer memories at Mitchel Pool. Dave, Jim, John and I spent hundreds of hours over the next couple of summers there.

Dave and I got a big upgrade in our lifestyle moving in with The Beckmans. The Beckmans had a lake right behind them, a big backyard and a chicken. It turned out Jim and John had hatched chicks and Fluffy was the result of one of those chicks. Fluffy was kept away from the house with a small pen by the garden. Dave and I soon learned how to feed and water Fluffy. How to let him out in the morning (which would be mostly me – when I remembered) and we would also lock him up at night or an animal would eat him.

We soon learned it was a test of manhood to have Fluffy chase you but that took time for me. Only Jim was master of that chase. So when Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack had guests over there would be an eventual race between Jim and Fluffy with Jim always winning. The race was always offered to the guest or their children but very few accepted the challenge. And after the race, John would pick Fluffy up and drop him back into his pen.

The lake was another rest spot for my bruised soul. After moving in, Dave and I were soon equipped with our own fishing poles and tackle boxes. John and Jim showed us how to dig for worms in the garden and fish in the small bay behind the house. I have spent weeks, if not months, sitting on those railroad ties, legs dangling over the water and pole out laying next to me. Uncle Ray would come over and give a few fishing lessons – and lures. He taught me how to fish with plastic worms for bass. Uncle Jack taught us how to filet but Uncle Ray taught us how to skin bullhead for our very rare fish fries. John and I fished the most – passing summer mornings quietly together down by the lake.

The first summer we were there the Lake Eleanor Association was having the lake dredged. A dredger was a floating crane type of machinery that dug out the bottom of the lake to make it deeper. It wasn’t long before the bulky derelict floating platform made its way into our small little bay. We would wave to the dirty hairy guy working the dredger. He would wave back and slowly work his way toward our bay swinging his extension out in front of his rig. It was like watching floating construction with only one truck. After a while we got bored and just started fishing but fishing wasn’t any good when the dredger was nearby. When he was deep into our bay, we wouldn’t even bother to fish. And within a couple of days, he would be gone and in another part of the lake so we could fish again.

Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack also had a canoe. John and I would go canoeing and find our friend The Dredger. We would wave ‘Hello’ and we would paddle around him. We would head out to the island in the middle of the lake to explore. But since the island was only 30 or so foot circle, there wasn’t much to explore once you looked behind the few trees and bushes there.

I remember one time fishing on the island by myself. I was using a plastic worm setup just as Uncle Ray had taught me. Off in the distance was a Mallard duck. As he swam toward me I practiced my casting by seeing how close I could get to the duck. A few weeks earlier I had actually hit the duck freaking it out and sent it swimming, then flying, away. So this time I was more careful.

I was actually impressing myself on my casts with my Zebco spincast. In another year or so I would graduate to a spinning reel. I found if I cast in front of the duck he would come towards my worm. So I tried to see how close I could lead the duck towards me. That was a mistake. At one point I cast too close and Mr. Mallard swam toward my worm and dove for it! Well, he got it – or rather I got him. In my fear of hooking him, I jerked the worm away only to hook him in the chest. He started squawking and quacking with fear. Worse he was trying to swim away from me. I started reeling him in so I could unhook him. On the other side, I wasn’t sure how I was going to deal with a flapping duck when I finally got him in. And he was strong.

The harder I tried to reel him the stronger he seemed to get. For every yard I would reel him in my drag would peel out two more yards. I realized I wouldn’t be able to deal with Mr. Mallard – if I actually got him to shore. I was also afraid he might pull all my line out and then what? And that awful noise he was making…

So I grabbed my 8-pound line and snapped it. Squawking and thrashing he swam a good distance but he was too tired to fly. He floated for a bit and then took off flying a short distance only to land near the far shore. Crap. In our struggle, I could see my worm firmly planted in his chest. I felt terrible. And I certainly didn’t feel like fishing anymore. So I packed up my stuff back into the canoe and paddled back to the house. The one that got away.

John and I would also canoe around the lake but it wasn’t a ‘swimming’ lake. Dave and I were told it was too dirty to swim in so John and I were surprised on one of our canoeing trips on the far end of the lake when we found some kids swimming in the lake – they must not have gotten the memo. As we paddled pass them, one of them swam over and tipped us over! We got a little freaked. It was one thing to get wet in your swimming suits but quite another to be tipped over fully dressed – well, shorts and t-shirts. After that, we kept our canoe trips away from the far side of the lake, away from people who were actually swim in the lake. The lake water must cause mental lapses. We kept our swimming at Mitchel Pool.

I continued my stamp collecting which was going full tilt with the Bicentennial coming the following year. We got swept up in the beer can collecting craze that was going on in the seventies. Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack indulged us taking us to dumps (literally), Beer Can Conventions in local hotels, strangers houses and a liquor store in Lakehurst that stocked beer to take advantage of this fad. We would get full cans from the liquor store. So whenever guests arrived to the house, we would offer them a beer so the emptied can could be added to one of the three collections. We each had a collection – except me – I had to be different so I collected pop cans. Maybe not as cool but it was the beginning of me rebelling – at little of a rebellion as it was.

I would also start collecting records. I know Hope and Lee had gotten 45’s before, at least I think they did, but I had never actually owned any myself. This was how I was introduced to Lenny’s shop – the Deerfield Record Store. Record collecting would prove to be a life long passion.

Many Sundays after church we would stop at Deerbrook Mall, an indoor/outdoor mall on the corner of Waukegan and Lake-Cook Roads. Back then the mall was anchored by Turn Style and Montgomery Ward department stores. We almost never ventured into the outdoor part to the north. Aunt Joyce would typically show at Turn Style so we would go to the indoor mall through Turn Style entrance.

The mall was decorated with dark brown stone with various copper statues in fountain areas. Someone in the late sixties must have decided copper was the newest medium for sculptures – all the malls were using it. The mall had maybe thirty stores including Baskin Robbins, Musicland and Waldenbooks. I would begin my record collecting with purchases from Musicland and my friend Jeff Raveria would eventually work at Waldenbooks where I would officially buy my first hardcover copy of a Stephen King book.

Being in 7th grade I had been getting pretty good at the impulse begging for trinkets when at the store. So that late morning as we wandered around Turn Style waiting for Aunt Joyce to get her purchases together. We learned John and Jim begged liked any kid their age. Dave and I, however, stood around like friends accompanying their friend’s family on a shopping trip. These were not our parents so we have no legitimate reason to beg for gifts or trinkets. Yet we stood on the sidelines hoping that maybe we could be included since we now lived with them. So it was ‘wishes come true’ when Aunt Joyce relented and said we could get something as long as it was under a dollar – and Dave and I were included.

I went back to the music department and got Wing’s “Listen to What the Man Said.” It would be my first 45. Now I could listen to Paul McCartney and drift back to those afternoons at Mitchell Pool any time I wanted. Back to the pool where I felt comfortable; where I could play with my brother and my cousins; spend time reading my books and enjoying those bright summer days.

I thought it would be great to collect all these songs and be able to play them whenever I wanted. And I did. In the years that followed, we would have a stereo in our room and there would be many trips to Deerfield Record Shop. We would purchase the top 45 – based on the WLS survey chart Lenny made available at his store.

Dave and I marked all our 45’s with Aunt Joyce’s Dymo labeler. We used three-lettertter initials – ‘DBZ’ or ‘JMZ’. John and Jim couldn’t because theirs initials were both the same – ‘JLB’. At one point Dave and I went in together, 50¢ each and bought was ever was number one that week. Those 45’s were marked with ‘DJ’ (yea, we thought it was cool but it was actually only cute – then realized it was dorky). I still have most of those 45’s and most of their labels are still attached.

So when school started that Fall, I was the new kid. Something I slowly got over – among other things. But in that process not being ‘the new kid’, I would go downstairs to Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack’s basement , which was now our basement, and setup the portable record player we had. Using the record player’s 45 adapter, I could play “Listen To What The Man Said” and be transported to a summer afternoon a few months earlier. The single speaker on the record player reminded me of the terrible poolside speakers at Mitchell. And as the soldier boy kissed his girl, I left behind my tragic world and found myself once again in the warm sun at Mitchell pool. I would be years before I would fall in love, or what I thought was love but that alto sax spun me back to those carefree days of my first summer in my new home with my new family.