Heard you missed me...

Yes, it's been a while since I last posted; a few things have happened since then. I'm working in Chicago now, trying to get ready for retirement; I lost my mother last October and commuted between Phoenix, Kansas City, Chicago and New York for all the activities related to that, then had to fight a bladder infection (I know, TMI). Well, I'm back now, and I hope to make the updates more frequent.



Speaking of my recently departed mother, the most obvious memories of her would understandably be from my childhood: some memories from the '60's but the most vivid are, of course, from the '70's! I can even break them down year by year; that's how fond of the '70's I am!



Seriously, though, I remember the trip our family took to Florida in the summer of 1970. We stayed at the Marco Polo hotel in Miami Beach. It was a very nice hotel as I recall; we were able to go swimming on the beach behind the hotel.



On the way to Miami we made a stop in Titusville, Florida. My father had served as a full-time minister there in the '50's, and wanted to look up some friends that still lived there. My brother and I still chuckle at our memories of Titusville; it was a long way from Kansas City!

Scared of girls!

The summer of 1971 was a very interesting summer for my brother and me. I would say that was the summer I had the most fun, because that was when my friend Ronnie and I started our paper baseball league, sort of a spin-off of paper football. Most any kid from the '70's remembers paper football; well, we just took the paper football and played baseball with it!

That was also the summer when some of the girls in the neighborhood noticed my brother, who was 14, and I guess they liked him, but he was slightly uncomfortable with the attention. Once they detected that, there was no stopping them! There was one of the neighborhood girls that told him, "You're scared of girls!" Whenever they saw him with me and Ronnie outside, they started chasing us around the block. Mainly they were chasing my brother and Ronnie; I was only 9 years old and couldn't do much for them even if they had caught me, which they never did.

This was a sort of turning point for my brother. He’d always been a little shy around girls but this was something that even caught him by surprise. The girls in our neighborhood were like sharks; once they smelled blood in the water there was no turning back. If they sensed that you were scared of girls, they would not hesitate to exploit that fear; in my brother’s case, the girls in the neighborhood were honed in to his psyche like radar!

In my case it was a little different; mainly because I was younger. I was not quite as hesitant around girls as my brother was; I had my first “girlfriend” at 8 years old! She really wasn’t my girlfriend, but she knew I liked her and back then she liked me, too. The thing is, I only saw her twice in two years because she moved out of our neighborhood soon after we started “liking” each other.

Years later, we moved to a neighborhood not far from where she had moved, and we wound up going to the same school. I wasn’t any more or less hesitant around girls by then (I was 13), but she apparently had moved on and had little interest in me by then. Now I knew what “more fish in the sea” meant!

They never caught my brother or Ronnie, either, but they sure made him sweat! Even now when we reminisce about the old days, any time I yell out "Scared of girls!" he gets what I call that "Eddie" look on his face. Forty years have not dulled the senses!

Check out the music trivia below; you probably forgot all about this oldie!

R. Dean Taylor

It's so interesting that two brothers could grow up in the exact same environment and yet have divergent perspectives on how they grew up. My brother called me last week and couldn't believe that I compared our family to the Cleavers. Sorry, bro, I couldn't use "Diff'rent Strokes"!

I do vaguely remember a show called "J.T." which was on for only half a season, if I recall correctly. This would have been around the winter of early '71, because if my memory serves me as it should, I was in 4th grade. Kevin Hooks (remember him?) was the star of the show; many remember him later in the decade showing up in the cult classic series "The White Shadow", also starring Ken Howard. I don't think I ever saw Kevin Hooks in anything after that series, maybe because he's mainly a director these days.

Another memory I have from 4th grade is the scare my parents got when my brother had an asthma attack and had to go to the hospital. I probably didn't freak out much because I wasn't aware of how difficult it is to breathe with asthma; on the other hand, my mother was all too aware and the whole world knew it - well, our world, anyway. The song "I'll Be There" by the Jackson 5 always reminds me of sitting in the parking lot at Children's Mercy Hospital on Independence and Woodland in Kansas City, Missouri, waiting for my brother to get out of there.

When we finally got home, the first thing I did was run to our neighbors' house to see if my best friend, Ronnie, could come out to play. Hanging out with Ronnie was a ritual of ours that my brother had to miss out on for a bit while he recovered from his asthma episode. Ronnie's full name was Ronald Dean Sublett but we sometimes called him R. Dean Sublett. Why, you may ask, did we do that? Could it have something to do with the artist of a top 5 hit in the late autumn of 1970, whose name was R. Dean Taylor? One never knows, but...

From last post: the answer is Israel "Popper Stopper" Tolbert; this week's quiz is below the fold. Enjoy!

BIG-LEGGED WOMAN

If you grew up in the '70's like I did, you have many memories of the many images that stick to your consciousness, unyieldingly, like rats to a New York City subway. From Richard Nixon to the Jackson 5 to the Brady Bunch to pet rocks to Renee Richards, there is no shortage of people, places, music and other things that remain burned in our memory, evoking either pleasure or pain even after all these years.

I can honestly say, though, that I have mostly pleasant memories from those years. I had a friend tell me that our family's last name should have been Cleaver instead of Jones because of our resemblance to the "Leave It To Beaver" clan. As I look back, I can see how we actually did sort of project that image; our family structure was identical with the working dad, stay-at-home mom and two brothers five years apart.

The fact that we were black was irrelevant; we were much more like the Cleavers than like, say, the Evans family from "Good Times". There were other families that lived near us, black and white, that were definitely more from the "hood" than we were, and we lived in the "hood"! Let me put it this way: my brother and I usually remembered to flush the toilet behind ourselves. If we didn't, our mother would have very choice words for us!

Anyway, as quaint as a show like "Leave It To Beaver" seems now, I watched the reruns every day. I never wanted to miss any episode, even though I'd already seen it a few rerun cycles before. I suppose that even then I subconsciously recognized the similarities of our families.

Now as to the theme for today, there's a method to this madness: we had neighbors that were from Louisiana, and they were really into the "gutbucket" soul and blues from the South. I remember hearing my father laughing about this song called "Big Legged Woman" that the neighbor liked. Check out the sample below to hear this old-school down-south groove, and see if you can guess the artist. I'll have the answer next blog. Enjoy!