The Library Crew
My next-older brother Mark finished high school the year before I started. In leaving, he passed along his words of wisdom. Volunteer to work in the library, he said, and you won’t regret it. So sometime during the first few weeks of the school year, I dropped by the library, introduced myself to the librarian1, and told her that my brother had said that I should volunteer. She laughed, but gave me a job in the back room.
The back room of the library was populated by what could only be called geeks. Little did I know that, by joining them, I would become one of them.2 It was there that I met Bob C, who, like Lester R, would become a lifelong friend, colleague, and mentor. Bob was into electronics, as were a number of the other decidedly unpopular kids who hung out in the library. One of our first jobs was to create an alarm system that would let the librarian known whenever people came and went through the back door of the library, to prevent someone from letting in miscreants who wanted to steal the knowledge set aside for the good students. Bob used a magnetic switch coupled to an illuminated lamp; close the door and the lamp would go off; open it, and the lamp would go on. Pretty trivial, but I thought it was very cool.
1975, my freshman year in high school, as a time of enormous change in the world, though few people realized it at the time. In January of that year (when I was still in eighth grade), Popular Electronics ran an article on the Altair 8800, the first true microcomputer. When I was a freshman, I joined the school’s competitive slide rule team; by the time I graduated, the slide rule competition had been eliminated in favor of another mathematics competition that permitted the use of a pocket calculator. During that time, a number of my library friends and myself started a computer club; we called it The Beaumont Computer Group.
April 14, 2012 1 Comment
Classical Music
My older brother Ted graduated from high school in 1972. At some point before that (probably around 1969), he acquired a reel-to-reel tape copy of Wendy1 Carlos’s “Switched-On Bach.” This was hugely important to me, at least in memory, because it was my first real introduction to classical music. Moreover, the album’s innovative use of the Moog synthesizer was also on the cutting edge of modern music.
At some point in the early 1970′s I started listening to tons of classical music. I would spend hours in the Beaumont Public Library (both the original one in the converted church as well as the new one that was constructed about the same time), digging through the stacks as well as checking out music to listen to at home. At some point around the beginning of high school, I received a very nice cassette tape recorder for Christmas. Once I had a tape recorder, I would check out albums from the library and record them onto cassette to listen to later.2 I worked my way through Bach (which is where I started), Beethoven, and Mozart (who, frankly, I found fairly frivolous and uninteresting). I climbed the heights of Mahler and soared into the wondrous clouds of Stravinsky. And, ultimately, I found the esoteric avante garde in the works of Pierre Boulez, especially his 12-tone Pli Sélon Pli, which was (and still is) one of the more fascinating musical works I’ve ever heard.3
- Of course, she was Walter Carlos back then. ↩
- I realize now that this was a Very Bad Thing. At the time, however, I had no conception of copyrights or “intellectual property,” and it wasn’t until a few years later when my own music was being copyrighted that I started to understand how the system worked. ↩
- I realize that music like this is not for everyone. It takes work—long, hard, concentration and analysis—to understand and appreciate music like this. For most people, music is something to be tasted, enjoyed, and then either repeated or ignored. I tended to approach music like an engineer—I wanted to know how it works, and what needs to be put on paper to achieve the results. The music itself, the results, were almost secondary to me; it was much more important to understand how to get there. ↩
February 1, 2012 Leave a comment
Marching Band
August 1975 was swelteringly hot.
I can say that with all honesty because, even though I cannot remember the specifics from the summer I started attending Forest Park High School, it is always hot in Southeast Texas in August. Moreover, it is usually humid, and sometimes raining. I know it rained on the first day of school, at least, because I know that I was 12-for-12 in having it rain1 on the first day of school. Marching band practice started in early August, and consisted of 2- to 3-hour sessions on the practice field out in front of the school.
As the biggest freshman boy in the percussion section, I was awarded the bass drum. The other bass drummer was a sophomore named Lester who had actually volunteered for the role.2 Lester showed me the ropes, and I learned to march in a reasonably straight line, and I learned how to play the bass drum part to “The Young Lions” (the school’s fight song derived from the title song of the 1958 movie).3 We marched “8 to 5″; that is, we took eight steps for every five yards, which means that each step is precisely 22-1/2″ long. This has stuck with me; ask me to walk somewhere, and I will lead with my left foot, and my stride length is still precisely 22-1/2″ long.
- Torrentially. If you haven’t lived in Southeast Texas, you should be grateful. ↩
- I think that they didn’t want two freshmen on the bass drum because the bass drum is somewhat critical to setting the tempo when marching, and because they didn’t trust freshmen, but I don’t know this for certain. ↩
- An irrelevant aside: if you’d like to hear what this sounds like, go to Spotify and search for “The Young Lions.” You should find an album entitled “Music From The Films Of Marlon Brando” (he was in the movie, “The Young Lions”). Click on the “Superman – Main Theme” link and not “The Young Lions” link; the two tracks are mislabeled and reversed. ↩
January 27, 2012 1 Comment
Gadgets
I inherited my geekiness about gadgets from my father. You might not expect an infatuation with small electronic devices (what I call “gadgets”) from a person who was born in 1926 and raised in the rural part of southeast Texas, but he always showed a fascination with equipment like that. He was, after all, trained as a quartermaster in the Navy. Plus, he was an avid amateur photographer at a time when personal cameras were not all that common.
We have a picture of him, taken sometime during the end of WWII, his shirt off, drying rolls of some film on the deck of his Navy ship.1 The film is unusual; certainly much bigger then 35mm, it also appears to be much longer than the average roll of 6.5cm film (which is usually only a dozen or so shots). This looks like there could easily be fifty images in the 6.5 or 4.5cm format.
- An LST, or “Landing Ship Tank,” a very large amphibious craft intended to deposit tanks on the shores of the numerous Pacific islands. ↩
January 21, 2012 1 Comment
A joke my mother told me
The teacher said to the student, “Robert, please use ‘Rotterdam’ in a sentence.”
Robert said, “Susie eats too much candy and if she doesn’t watch out it’ll Rotterdam teeth out.”
January 20, 2012 Leave a comment
Snow Day
One year (it must have been either my 7th or 8th grade year, because I was still in middle school), the Beaumont school systems shut down for three days because of snow—the only time, in my life, when the school was closed because of snow.
You have to understand that snow in Beaumont is not entirely unknown. Even though Beaumont is near the Gulf Coast, it does freeze, sometimes for days at a time. When we were still living on 3185 Gilbert, we had snow one winter, but it did not “stick” because the ground was so warm.
January 18, 2012 Leave a comment
Never trust anyone
In the early June following my 8th grade year, my brother Ted got married in Houston, Texas. Ted had spent two years at Lon Morris (Junior) College in Longview, Texas, and had met his future wife, Dale, there. The traditional June wedding was held at Dale’s church in southwest Houston. I was an usher, along with some of my various cousins (we had tons of cousins) and, along with my brother Mark, we took responsibility for ensuring that Ted’s car was suitably decorated for his honeymoon departure.
However, Ted had a rather devious plan to avoid taking a fully-decorated car on his honeymoon. He parked his car in front of the church on the day of the wedding, but he had arranged with my parents to borrow their car for the honeymoon, and he had left the car in the driveway of an elderly gentleman (a good friend) who lived a few blocks away from the church. He would leave the church with all the traditional good wishes and rice-throwing, drive his car to the friend’s house, change to Mom & Dad’s car, and then leave on his honeymoon unscathed.
However, the elderly gentleman1 approached me and my brother Mark at the wedding and said, “I really hate to see Ted leave town in an undecorated vehicle,” and handed us the keys to the car. We drove over to his house, decorated that car fully, then came back to the church for some light shaving cream and shoe polish action on Ted’s car.
Ted & Dale were a bit surprised when they got out of Ted’s car at the friend’s house, expecting a clean getaway.
You really can’t trust anyone.
- I’m really sorry that I don’t know his name. ↩
January 16, 2012 Leave a comment
tl;dr
I had envisioned this tale, this blog, to consist of chapters that correspond to the various chapters in my life: elementary school, middle school, high school, university, and so on, but I quickly came to the realization that some of those chapters would be excessively long. And, while the readership of this work is already small, expecting someone to wade through the equivalent of a 40-page chapter is a bit much to ask, even of people who actually like me. The post about my middle school years took me several days to complete, and I can imagine that it would take months if I tried to cram all of high school into a single post.
So, I won’t do that to you.
Instead, I’ll try to group things into smaller subjects while keeping the overall flow roughly chronological. For example, instead of having a single post about my high-school years, I can break it into several smaller chunks, each of which are easier to digest.1
You can thank me later, if you happen to make it that far.
- Not to mention easier for someone to skip if they’re not interested in those particular bits. ↩
January 15, 2012 Leave a comment
Flam, diddle, paradiddle, drag
1973 was a tumultuous year. The Watergate scandal was on everyone’s television set, Spiro T. Agnew resigned as Vice President, and the Yom Kippur War kept Middle East tensions in the forefront of the world’s attention. In Beaumont, Texas, I played a lot of baseball and then started attending Joseph J. Vincent Middle School that autumn. The school used to be Forest Park High School, but a new Forest Park HS was opened in 1971, and the old one was converted for use as a middle school. The biggest event for me that fall, however, was beginning my musical career.
All of my brothers had been band members. Warren (the oldest) played flute and then tuba (an odd combination, yes?). Ted was a percussionist, and Mark played trombone. Before we had moved from our house at 3185 Gilbert, my mother had gotten her teaching credentials and, as a graduation gift, my dad had gotten her an electric organ. Ted went on to play guitar in a rock’n'roll band, and both he and Mark continued as avid amateur musicians. With this heritage, it was inconceivable that I should do something other than join the band and, quite honestly, I never considered any other option. I chose the drums; my parents acquired a new Ludwig snare drum, and I started tapping on things.1 My band director, however, was a remarkable man named Don Knapp. He taught me the rudiments of drumming, some of which I remember to this day.2 If you’re not careful, you might learn about the diddle, the flam, the paradiddle, and the roll, not to mention the drag.3 There will be more about “Mr. Knapp,” as we called him, in a future chapter but, for now, let me just say that his introducing me to music is one of the greatest joys my life has known.
- A bad habit that continues to this day. ↩
- Drum rudiments are the basic strokes used for playing a drum. There are 40 standard ones, and the traditional method of teaching percussion involved learning, memorizing, and practicing all of them. “Modern” percussion has loosened up on some of these traditions and has altered the basic strokes to be more in conformance with what a drummer in a stage band would use rather than someone in a military band. ↩
- It amuses me to no end that this page may end up in the search engine results for various pornographic queries. ↩
January 15, 2012 1 Comment
The most powerful emotion
As I have mentioned, my father and brothers were active in the Boy Scouts. When I was very young, I was part of the “Junior Patrol”—five or six kids who were too young to join the Scouts, but who were sons of Scoutmasters. We had our own tent, and we went on most of the camping trips with Troop 7 (the Scout troop associated with Fehl Elementary). As part of this, I hiked to the Mexican border in Big Bend National Park and to the tops of mountains in Colorado and Wyoming. I went on canoe trips on the Neches River and I stayed in a tent and fished for trout in Yellowstone National Park.
With the forced integration brought about by the Civil Rights Act and the subsequent “white flight” from the urban areas to the suburbs, Troop 7 disbanded and my father and brothers no longer participated in scouting. I remained enthusiastic, however, so when I finally turned 11 (the minimum age at that time for becoming a Scout), I talked my folks into letting me join the local Scout troop associated with a nearby church. One evening, I attended my first Scout meeting as a “Tenderfoot.” I was assigned to a Patrol, and given the office of Scribe (I was supposed to write stuff down).
After some activities, the troop gathered as a whole unit (instead of in separate Patrols) and held a ceremony to honor the Scribes. The scoutmaster asked the scribes to come forward, so I stood up and moved to the front of the room. Everyone started laughing, and the scoutmaster explained that he was looking for the troop Scribes, a pair of high-school seniors who had won those jobs the year before. He sent me back to my seat, my face burning with the utter humiliation and shame of my mistake.
I never attended another Scout meeting, ever.
January 14, 2012 Leave a comment