Although
he had been around for quite a while, I didn’t hear an Elvis song until
I was in the fifth grade in 1961. I lived on Meadowbrook Lane in Pine Hills,
Florida. There was a girl’s house that my friends and I used to play at.
Why, I don’t know. But it was here that I got my first taste of Elvis.
I was developing my personality in the fifth grade. I had
friends and at times even got to lead our pack in our endeavors. We were sort
of a "Rat Pack" of the time. We had dug an incredible network of tunnels
in a vacant lot three lots down from my house. We used plywood to support the
roofs of the different rooms we had dug out. We could get at least eight kids
in those tunnels at a time and even had to use candles to light our underground
rooms. It was a lot of fun until a construction company decided to drive onto
the lots in preparation for building several new houses. We didn’t know
anything about it until we came home from school and saw a bulldozer pulling
a truck out of one of our rooms. To a person, we all denied any knowledge of
the underground network. But we had lots of suggestions for where they came
from: transient vagrants, Martians, alligators, turtles and my favorite, large
moles. We don’t think they suspected.
I had heard of Elvis. I heard my dad comment that his nickname
was "Elvis the pelvis" and that he danced too lewd for the public
to see. We were hanging around in this girl’s carport and she asked if
we had heard the newest from Elvis. We said "No," and she proceeded
to set up a record player, the suitcase kind, and plopped on a 45. I didn’t
know that it was a 45, but noticed that it would probably sail forever if you
side-armed it across a field.
Sarah set the tone arm down on the record and the strains of "You Ain’t
Nothin’ but a Houn’ Dog" pierced the air. I was duly unimpressed.
It was no "Black Saddle," but I thought he had promise.
I had a friend named Tom Childers at this time. He was my
age and we shared a lot of likes (bike riding) and dislikes (girls). I liked
to go over to his house more than bring him to mine. I had two sisters and a
brother that would not leave us alone at my house. He was an only child. We
could play in his room for hours and not be bothered. His mom made great peanut
butter and jelly sandwiches.
He lived on a street of house that looked all alike. And the
street next to his had houses that all looked like those in his street. The
first time I got permission to go to his house—which was about a half mile
from mine—I turned on the wrong street and thought I was on his. I walked
up to what I thought was his house, knocked on the door and was horrified when
the man who answered the door was neither him nor his father. The man told me
he had moved there about three months ago. I thought, "How can this be?
Tom was at school yesterday and he surely would have mentioned that he moved!"
While pondering this dilemma, a woman who recognized me asked
what I was doing there. I explained the situation and my concern that Tom did
not tell me he had moved. She told me that she thought he lived on the next
street over. I followed her directions and soon found myself, with great relief,
at his house. That’s not the only time this happened to me. I repeated
this event six years later when I first drove my car to Darylynn’s house.
But that’s another story.
One of the great things about Tom to me was his wealth of
stuff. Tom even had a piano in his room, an upright model placed at the end
of his immense bed. We played with lots of toys at Tom’s, but that piano
kept beckoning for my fingers. Tom was totally disinterested in it, but there
were times I know I sat and stared at the piano longingly. I never did play
it, never even lift the keyboard cover, but oh, how I wanted to tickle those
ivories!
Tom was not very popular with the boys, but for a fifth grader,
he could have had any girl he wanted. He looked, as I recall, a lot like Jay
North of the ’60s’ show Dennis the Menace—blond, cute, trim and
wide-eyed. If I had known any better, I’d have hung around just to pick
up the girls he wasn’t interested in, but I hadn’t figured out that
girls were desirable at this point in my life.
I got in a fight once for being a friend of Tom. We were walking
along a street one day and three boys, I’ll call them the Scraggs (in memory
of Al Capp), walked up to us and asked who we were. Tom told them who he was
and I did the same. When they heard Tom’s name, one of the boys informed
us that he didn’t like Tom Childers, challenged us to a fight and started
pushing Tom. The other two started pushing me and the next thing I knew, we
were in a rumble right there in someone’s front yard. As I recall, no punches
were thrown, but there was a lot of wrestling. I seemed to do okay with the
two Scraggs that were wrestling me (much to my surprise), but Tom and his antagonist
were in a far more heated battle. When my two guys couldn’t pin me down,
I finally suggested that this was going nowhere and Tom and I would just leave.
That seemed amenable to all.
As we were dusting ourselves off, the Scragg that had been
fighting with Tom said, "Say, you’re a pretty good fighter."
"I have to be," said Tom. "I’m an only
child."
"That’s why I don’t like you," said Scragg
number one.
"That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,"
I said.
"You want to be friends?" asked Tom.
"Okay," said Scragg one. "It’s better
than fightin’."
That’s the first time I can remember shaking someone’s
hand in agreement. What’s that got to do with music, you ask? When you’re
a musician, you have to shake a lot of hands. And, you have to smooth a lot
of ruffled feathers.