State of the Blog and Head Count

I thought it might be time for a status report of sorts, a kind of "state of the blog" post for lack of a better term. I'm still having fun with this and don't plan on quitting any time soon. I'm also still actively searching for old classmates, and as I can I'm adding their names to the email list. To those of you getting emails from me asking you to join in, please don't worry, I'm harmless and don't mean to be a pest, but why not give it a go and answer me. To those of you I haven't emailed yet, why don't you beat me to the punch and email me first. Let us know how you are doing and join in our little group. My email is on my profile page, or click on my name in the tag board to the left and you can get it there too.

Most of these posts come from the empty space between my ears, but if you look close you'll see that Brenda Nicholson has added some and there are comments to the posts from several more people. Also, one or two of the posts were brought about by comments I've gotten in emails, in fact the entire blog is based on a comment made in an email by Kathey. So it’s not just me, a lot of people have contributed.

In the interest of making it easier to move around and communicate, I have placed several things on the side board that takes up the left side of the blog.

-- First, there is a tag board, a “tag, you’re it” kind of thing. It's for quick little notes, hellos, etc. If you hover over the poster’s name in the tag board you should get a popup that displays the date it was posted. If the poster added their email address, you can click on their name to get that.

-- Next there are links I've added to go directly to the yearbook pictures and to the yearbook group picture.

-- After that is a guestbook. It’s similar to the tag board except it’s stored on another page and the notes can be longer.

-- The Previous Posts is a listing of the past 10 or so posts. You can click on the post’s title to go directly to it.

-- Next are the archives. I have the blog set up to archive each month. By clicking on the month you can see the posts added that month.

-- Next is the list of contributors. I would love to see this list grow a lot. You can contribute posts by signing into Blogger.com. If anyone wants to contribute and has any questions, please feel free to email me, and I will offer any help I can.

I’ve also added a couple of things that run in the background to keep stats on the blog. There have been 236 hits in the last 14 days, or about 17 hits a day. I have the hit counter set to exclued me since I come and go on the blog so often. Those are not exactly the same numbers put up by Google, but what the heck, I'm satisfied.

And last but far from least, I want to thank everybody that has contributed to this or has joined the email list. You folks are absolutely terrific, and I very humbly appreciate you joining in to make this not just my blog, but our blog. Here’s the ones who have contributed, joined in, or simply just sent words of encouragement since this thing started. Thanks buds... 'preciate it. :)

Regrets, I Have a Few, But Then Again… Who Doesn’t?

If I give the impression that high school was all fun and games to me, loaded with fond memories and good times, that’s because that’s how I choose to look at it. It wasn’t all fun and games of course. Not for me, not for any of us. I’m not denying reality; I’m just denying myself the trouble of dwelling on it. Obviously there are things I would change if I could go back.

For one thing I would try harder. Instead of going with the flow so much I would swim upstream against the current a little bit more often.

I would have joined more clubs and organizations and widened my social circle some.

I wouldn’t have let a coach’s offhand comment make me decide not to at least try, because there might have been something there I could have done.

I would have dated more than I did. I would have probably been told no a lot more often, but what the heck, I could also have gotten one or two more yeses. :)

I would have tried to be a better friend.

In other words, I would have changed what I could, not what I can't. I can't change who I am or what side of the tracks I came from, even if I wanted to, so there's no point in trying.

Yep, I choose to usually look at the brighter side of things, because the alternative is to get sour and bitter and second guess everything that happened, and most of them are things I have no control over anyway, so why worry about them at all? Besides, I’m ugly enough as it is without the extra grey hair and wrinkles that comes with that kind of outlook. :)

Some Things I Learned in High School

Under oath I will disavow any participation in any of the following lessons learned in high school, especially if they seem inappropriate in any way. I will only admit to "hearing" about them. :)

1. I don't know about now, but in the fall of 1966, if you mouthed off to an upper classman, your pants will go up the flagpole.

2. A shotgun shell, with the shot removed and clamped tightly into a vice in Industrial Arts, and then hit on the firing cap with a screwdriver and hammer, will create a noise sufficiently loud enough to be heard in the principal’s office.

3. Being so bored in Study Hall that you and a friend decide to write a note to one of the girls explaining to her everything you learned in health that day, will get you called out of your next class after the office compares the note to samples of your handwriting.

4. Viewing the tests the military recruiters gave as a day out of class and nothing really important will result in test scores so low the only jobs you will qualify for after you enlist have tools limited to a rake, a shovel and a horse stall.

5. Cellophane, when stretched tightly across a toilet bowl, will go unnoticed by most guys... until it's too late.

6. Trying to pull a prank (with notes in Study Hall again), by writing one note to a guy and another note to a girl, and then telling them that the notes are from each other, will actually end up with them dating for awhile. So much for pranks. This actually happened. The pranksters turned into match makers. :)

7. Chewing gum does not hide or mask the smell of beer on a 15 year old’s breath.

8. Carrying a girl’s books to class almost every day the first half of freshman year doesn’t mean diddly if another guy is walking the girl to class.

9. Smoking in the boy’s rest room is not smoking outside just because you have the window open. And they also will not take bad weather as an excuse.

10. Going to a meeting to determine if there is interest in starting a track team with a reputation for being involved in some of the items listed above will only cause the coach to start the meeting with a remark like, “How many of you are interested in starting up a track team, and how many of you are like *******, and are just here to get out of class?”

Where Did You Come From?

Loudon High School is named after the county not the city, so students come from a lot of places other than just the city of Loudon. I don't know how it is now, but when I went there most of the students did not come from the city of Loudon at all.

So where did you come from? Was it Loudon, or was it Philadelphia or Sunnyside? Maybe it was Davis, or Piney? How about Jackson or Steekee or Corinth? Was it Prospect, or Poplar Springs or Robinson Mill? How about Stockton Valley, or more toward Erie or Ten Mile?

Inside Loudon did you come from Reservoir Hill or Hospital Hill or Mexico or Pine Top or The Projects? (Man, how that term has changed over the years.)

Come on, help me out here. How many other areas or place names are there?

Where did you come from, better yet, where are you now?

What Did It Cost?

Okay, so every one of these nostalgic sites has one of those price comparison sections... so I guess I'll fall in with the rest of the herd. :)

By the way, that Median Household Income is annual.

1966
Cost of a new home -- $23,300.00
Median Household Income -- No Figure
Cost of a first-class stamp -- $0.05
Cost of a gallon of regular gas -- $0.32
Cost of a dozen eggs -- $0.60
Cost of a gallon of Milk -- $0.99

1967
Cost of a new home -- $24,600.00
Median Household Income -- $7,143.00
Cost of a first-class stamp -- $0.05
Cost of a gallon of regular gas -- $0.33
Cost of a dozen eggs -- $0.49
Cost of a gallon of Milk -- $1.03

1968
Cost of a new home -- $26,600.00
Median Household Income -- $7,743.00
Cost of a first-class stamp -- $0.06
Cost of a gallon of regular gas -- $0.34
Cost of a dozen eggs -- $0.53
Cost of a gallon of Milk -- $1.07

1969
Cost of a new home -- $27,900.00
Median Household Income -- $8,389.00
Cost of a first-class stamp -- $0.06
Cost of a gallon of regular gas -- $0.35
Cost of a dozen eggs -- $0.62
Cost of a gallon of Milk -- $1.10

1970
Cost of a new home -- $26,600.00
Median Household Income -- $8,734.00
Cost of a first-class stamp -- $0.06
Cost of a gallon of regular gas -- $0.36
Cost of a dozen eggs -- $0.62
Cost of a gallon of Milk -- $1.15

Can Anybody Here Dance?

As I've said several times on this blog, I like music. I hate listening to the radio, but I like music. This afternoon I was doing a little surfing, looking for stuff about an old R&B singer named Clifford Curry. You remember him, he sang "She Shot a Hole in My Soul". He's from Knoxville and it is rumored in some circles that he was the model for the Otis Day character on Animal House. Anyway, while reading a page that featured him I came across something that sounded familiar. You tell me if it rings a bell....

".... Around this time, WTVK-TV began running Dr. Al's Disco-Teen Show, which was a sort of live precursor to the modern music video ... "

Anybody remember Disco-Teen? Do you remember going? Alright, let's have a show of hands, who went on the show and actually danced? I won't embarrass him, but I remember one classmate who had the show's title semi-permanently attached to his name by a relative or someone who saw him dancing on the program. That's a heavy price to pay for being on TV.

Too bad they didn't have VCRs back then, huh? Try explaining those moves to your grandkids. :)

First Car Blues

There are certain guys that I envied in just about this order: Mike Littleton, Larry Lankford, Mike Delaney, and Wayne and Allen McNabb. These were the first guys that I remember cruising around in a car while I was still hoofing it. I remember one day down by the baseball field as I was strolling along with a young lady of interest from Lenoir City, Mike L. came driving by. He stopped and chatted with us for a minute or two and was every bit the gentleman. But what that little episode did, unintentionally and no fault of Mike’s, was it drove home the fact that I was of driving age but still walking, and a couple of weeks later that young lady of interest from Lenoir City, lost interest. :)

But I made up for it later. After I joined the Air Force I got my first car! All mine! I no longer had to depend on someone else. I plunked down $300 to a coworker for a 1962 Chevy II. It was beige (wild color, that), had a straight six motor, a 3 on the tree transmission and a bench seat with upholstery held together with duct tape. In that hot Southern California sun, the adhesive on the duct tape would melt and leave little black streaks up the back of my shirt, but who cared? It was used but it was mine, and I drove the hell out of it.

Five dollars would get a retread when one of the tires would blow, another 5 dollars would fill it up, and about every 500 miles or so one of the carburetor jets would clog up and I’d have to raise the hood and beat on the side of the carburetor with a tire iron to get it to start, but I loved it! We went someplace every weekend, anywhere from the beach to Vegas, and I didn’t spend one second worrying whether it would make the trip or not. I was young, I was invincible, and I was more than a little bit naïve. As they say, God looks after kids and fools, and I was a little bit of both, but at least I finally had a car.

Somewhere in a pile of rubber and steel
There's a rusty old shell of an automobile
And if engines could run on desire alone
That old Chevy II would be driving me home

(with apologies to Dan Seals)

Songs That Take Me Home

Over the years music has become a good friend. I have moved from country, to rock, to pop, to jazz, back to country, to big band, to... well you get the idea. My music collection ranges from Hank Williams to Henry Mancini, Frank Sinatra to Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd to Floyd Kramer, and Glen Campbell to Glen Miller.

But no matter where I am, there are certain songs that remind me of home. (In no order)

Old Days - Chicago
Country Roads - John Denver
Old Tennessee - Dan Fogleburg
Please Come to Boston - Dave Loggins (You know the chorus, I'm the number one fan of the man from Tennessee)
I Want to Make It With You - Bread (Only because I had a crush, or should I say the hots, for a certain to-remain-unnamed young lady when we graduated and it still reminds me of her)
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Theme - Ennio Morricone (Reminds me of 5 or 6 of us cramming into Larry Lankford's VW and driving around)
Time We Have Wasted on the Way - Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
In My Life - Judy Collins
Good Ol' Boys Like Me - Don Williams
Almost Home - Craig Morton (relatively new song, but still reminds me of home)
Love Is Blue - Paul Mauriat
Aquarius / Let the Sunshine - The Fifth Dimension (because a group came down from another high school for one of our assemblies and performed this. There was this girl out in front of the group dancing to this, and I can still close my eyes and see her.)

What songs remind you of high school. We know which one Brenda liked. :)

The Box

A couple of times in Journalism class I helped put together the boxes that were sent to "the boys in the service." We filled them with cookies, a copy of the Loudon Herald, pen and paper, and other little trinkets we thought the guys might like. I couldn't help but wonder if the guys really liked getting the boxes or whether they just tossed them as they got them. And then I found out.

After joining the Air Force and getting to my first assignment, I got a slip in my mailbox that said I had a package to pick up. It was one of the boxes. I already knew what was in it, but I was still excited. It was just a little shoebox wrapped in brown paper and twine, but it looked like a million bucks to me. I was holding something from home in my hands! The chocolate chip cookies were crumbs, but that didn't affect the taste, and I read every word of the Herald. Heck, I read every word of the Chieftain they included too and I didn't even know who d.s. was, but I knew that e.b. was dedicating "So Far Away" to them.

I got one of those boxes every few months, and enjoyed it very much. Not only that, but the guys I worked with adopted the Loudon Herald as their own. At first I got a little good natured ribbing from them about my "small town" newspaper and they laughed at what my grandmother called the "society page", that talked about who visited who, or who had Sunday dinner with someone else. The guys laughed at the "small town" stuff, but each of them would grab it and read it from cover to cover everytime I got a new one. I think it was refreshing to them to read a paper that wasn't centered around bad news.

It made me proud to be from Loudon.

Time Changes Us All

I know there are people who have looked this over and haven't contacted me, and that's okay. They don't have to. As I said in the beginning, this is strictly voluntary and they are under no obligation. I would still like to get a class email list together to make it easier to set up reunions and things like that, but I would also like to get people yammering back and forth with each other a little bit too, if that's possible. Remember how noisey the halls used to get between classes with everybody yakking? That's something like what I mean, only now it can be more the electronic kind if need be. But something else comes to mind and I hope it isn't what is standing in some people's way of joining in.

In the immortal words of Popeye, "I yam what I yam".

And we are who we are. Please don't think that just because you've gotten older and have changed some that you are in some way persona non grata around your old friends, because you're not. We all have greyer hair and a lot more wrinkles and most of us have put on more than a few extra pounds. We are not those fresh young faces in the yearbook anymore. We are mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, and we all carry the loads put on us by family and jobs and life in general. We have faced life and we have lost loved ones. We have the scars of mind and body that hurt now and probably always will. We have accomplished some of the goals and plans we made for ourselves back in high school, we've had to adjust some of the others, and there are others still we've had to flat out bury because they simply aren't going to happen. We are older (in my case uglier) and we may seem different than we were, but we have a bond between us that time cannot erase.

Because another thing we have, or had, is friendship, and that is what I'm after here. To see if friendships can be rekindled, the fires under them stoked just a little bit. We all had someone in our class we were very close to. If you're not keeping in touch with them now, wouldn't you like to be? In the words of John Lennon (although I prefer Judy Collins singing it)

There are places, I remember, all my life though some have changed
Some forever, not for better, some are gone, and some remain
All these places have their meanings with lovers and friends I still can recall,
Some are dead and some are living...in my life, I've loved them all.

I may be an old fart lost in the past, but this matters to me, and I think it matters to each of you, if even just a little. In some ways, I think the friendships will mean more to us now than they did back then. We once shared the aches and pains of becoming adults together, who better to lean on a little now when we face the aches and pains of getting older?

You'll find my email address on my profile sheet in this blog, and there's also a guestbook you can sign. Please, when you stop by, say hi. It doesn't have to be anything long or deep. Just leave me a note or an email. Better yet, leave a comment to one of the posts or add a post of your own. I will guarantee you that there's more than a handful reading this blog now, and you will make someone smile, starting with me. :)

Food for Thought

Now that there's a fast food place or restaurant on almost every corner, my two youngest kids find it funny that I can remember things like my first piece of pizza (I was 12), my first taco (I was 19), and my first Chinese food (early 20s). They find it remarkable that, except for school, we ate 98% of our meals at home. So they wanted to know what I did remember eating.

I remember Loudon hot dogs. I grew up thinking hot dogs automatically came with slaw and chili on them. Even now, on most of the trips home, I'll stop by Carl's Drive In and get a hot dog. I remember getting them from Grace's Cafe down near the chair factory (that cafe is a laundromat now I think), from a little diner under the bridge the two summers I worked on the city crew, and now at Carl's. When I was 19 and stationed in California we went to a fast food place called Der Wienerschnitzel that specialized in hot dogs. When I order one I asked the lady where the slaw and chili was and she said "We don't have slaw and you didn't order chili." Heck, I didn't know I had to. But I'm keeping the tradition going. When we fix hot dogs at home there's always slaw and chili handy, and 3 of my kids eat them that way all the time too. :)

I remember Brown Cow's. Every city I've ever lived in has had a vanilla ice cream bar that was dipped in chocolate and then put on a stick, but they don't taste as good as a Brown Cow did when I was a kid. Also, when I think of the creamery I remember a guy (can't recall his name) who drove a delivery truck for them, who would sometimes give us kids a small cup of ice cream as a "free sample". I'm convinced now that there were no free samples. He most likely opened a box out of the kindness of his heart to give to kids when it was hot. And the last thing I remember about the creamery was when I was 12 or 13 or so, on Saturday mornings a group of us guys would gather at the creamery and they'd take us to sell ice cream at the UT football games.

I remember stopping by the A&W after class and getting a frosty mug of root beer with the mug so cold that frost gathered on the outside. The root beer was so sweet and creamy. I also remember cruising there late on Friday or Saturday night to see who all was there.

I remember the soda fountain at Richeson's Drug Store where you could get up to four scoops on a cone, or a sundae, or a cherry coke, or whatever, and the jukebox that had a decent selection. My favorite was When a Man Loves a Woman by Percy Sledge. Why, oh why, did Michael Bolton have to screw that up?

When I was younger, I remember getting the small 8 ounce cokes at the skating rink that used to be under the big tent down by the baseball field. We used to go there to listen to music and hang out more than we skated.

I remember in high school going to a Burger Queen in south Knoxville, and if I remember right they had a half pound burger.

I also remember the beer joint down near Philadelphia where you could pull up to the back door and get a quart or a six pack with no questions asked if you had the money, but I don't tell my kids too much about that. :)

Lifeline

Each of us have different reasons for remembering the things we do. For me, my high school years were important for various reasons. I feel I became a man during that time, the draft was looming large and had to be dealt with, I made friendships that continue to this day, and you folks are still some of the best people I've ever known, but there was one other reason that didn't show up until 7 years later.

The pictures above are of the same place, taken at different angles, and obviously at different times of the year. In 1977 Uncle Sam decided to send me to this place. A rock named Shemya near the end of the Aleutian Islands, and believe me, you never fully get a good look inside yourself until you go to a place like this. Three hundred and sixty five days in Purgatory, or as we used to say at Shemya, "This place isn't the end of the world, but you can see the edge from here". It was isolated, desolate, barren and bleak. And those were it's good points. We got mail twice a week and phone calls on and off the island were limited by time and how bad the weather was, which was usually very bad. I can recall spending 3 days stuck in one building because the wind was gusting to over 100mph and we couldn't go outside, or getting 16" of snow one day and the next day the wind blew so hard it blew all the snow off the island. We once went almost 70 days in a row without seeing the sun, and nearly two months with the wind over 30mph while at the same time the fog was so thick you couldn't see 10 feet. But there were some nice things too. I saw the northern lights and the "green flash" that's visible just as the sun dips below the horizon, and I'm one of the few people who can say he went swimming in the Bering Sea.

The point to all this is when you're stuck in a place where lonliness is so consuming, you cling to things that make you smile. Things that make you feel good and help you stay steady and in some cases even protect your sanity. Things like pictures and memories of better times. For me, the pictures and memories were of my family, obviously, and of you guys too. You were in effect, a lifeline. Something I could turn to when it seemed like I'd never get back to the real world.

Thank you.

What If?

You guys ever play what if? I hope like heck I'm not the only one who does :) For example, what if my draft number had been 216 instead of 116 and I had not been forced to join the Air Force within 6 months of graduating? Not that I have any real regrets as to how things have turned out for me, but sometimes I find myself wondering if my life would be that much different had I stayed right there in Loudon.

I think I've got it fairly well figured out. Based on what I was doing and how things have changed (or depending on how you look at it, not changed) in Loudon. I would now be celebrating my 37th year with Maramont, although what I'd be doing there the good Lord only knows. I figure anything from manager to janitor, but most likely still running a boxing machine :) I would live either up on Reservoir Hill, or around Hospital Hill or down toward Philadelphia. I would be married, at least twice, but again, the good Lord only knows to who since when I left they weren't exactly beating my door down, and if my track record held up, I would have five kids, give or take one or two. I would go bass fishing at least twice a month, play golf at least once a week during the summer, and maybe coach my oldest son's first baseball team until some of the team parents ticked me off like they did in California. I would keep in touch with whoever I could as best I could, attend the reunions (like I have, except the last one), and at this point in my life I would have to think that things hadn't turned out too bad, which is pretty much how I feel about the way things really have turned out. Now, if I could only win a big Powerball before I retire everything will be perfect. :)

If your what-if games turn out differently, don't blame me :)

Just For Grins

If you think we've changed a lot since we were senions, take a look at us as juniors in the '69 yearbook. There is an amazing change in just that one year.