It's hard to believe that The Captain & Me: On and Off the Field with Thurman Munson will be released a week from today. The passage of time has been so strangely blurred over the course of the last year, it seems like just yesterday that Ron Blomberg and I had our first phone conversation about collaborating on this project... but it also seems like about ten years ago.
In any case, I am incredibly excited to have the book finally coming out (via Triumph Books, who have done a marvelous job with everything from the cover art to promotion), and incredibly pleased with some of the reviews we've gotten for it so far — most notably in the pages of no less than the Wall Street Journal, where Ben Yagoda wrote that he "gobbled The Captain & Me up like a packet of Famous Amos chocolate-chip cookies." (Extra points for the period-appropriate pop cultural reference, Ben!)
So far, at least, the response makes me feel like Ron and I accomplished what we set out to do with this book — give people a better sense of who Thurman Munson was as a teammate and a pal, as well as shed additional light on what it was like to play for the New York Yankees during those promising-but-frustrating seasons in the first half of the 1970s. If you dig the Yankees, New York City, 1970s baseball, moustaches, delicatessens, mobsters, locker room japery, and heartwarming tales of friendship, I think you'll find much to enjoy herein. And for those of you who have asked if I was aware that The Captain & Me shares a title with a Doobie Brothers album, I was indeed; in fact, the Doobies were one of Thurman's favorite bands, which is something we get into in the book.
In a normal world, Ron and I would be up in NYC next week to do in-person signing events. While we still hope to be able to do some later this spring and summer, the sad fact is that it would be difficult/irresponsible to put on such events while the pandemic is still raging. So in the meantime, we've got a virtual Zoom event happening on April 21 with Bookends in New Jersey; Ron and I will be talking about the book, and all "attendees" will receive a copy of it with Ron's signature. Ron's a great talker, and it should be a lot of fun.
If you would like a copy of the book with my signature on it, the best way to do that at this point would be to buy a copy from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Booksamillion, Bookshop, or your local bookseller, and then send it to me with a SASE so I can sign it and get it back to you. Message me via the email link on this blog, and I'll let you know where to send it.
As always, I'd like to thank everyone who has supported and encouraged my writing over the years — especially all of you who bought Big Hair & Plastic Grass when it first came out, thus propelling me on this amazing journey. I hope our paths will cross again, sooner than later.
Hank Aaron hitting home run number 715 is my first vivid baseball memory. Before that, baseball was always something that my dad had going on the TV while I was busy playing GI Joe or reading Mad Magazine or building models or drawing comics. Sports in general wasn't my thing in those early elementary school days.
But when the 1974 baseball season was about to begin, with Hank all but certain to break the Babe's home run record in the first week or two of April, my second grade teacher Mrs. Crippen brought the topic up for class discussion, and impressed upon us the sense that history was about to be made. I knew what a legend Babe Ruth was — after all, there was a gigantic, gilt framed photo of him hanging on the wall of Bimbo's, our favorite Ann Arbor pizza parlor — and even though I didn't understand much about baseball yet, I didn't mind when my dad made us watch Monday Night Baseball on April 5 instead of The Rookies, which was what I usually watched on Monday evenings. And I remember getting chills when Hank actually hit the record-breaker out of the park, which thankfully happened before my 9 pm bedtime.
A few weeks later, my dad had to go to Atlanta for a social work convention that my grandfather was also attending, and he took my sister and me with him so we could hang out with our grandparents. My two most vivid memories of that trip are of getting absolutely tanked on Mountain Dew while watching It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World on the TV in my grandparents' hotel room, and of my grandfather driving us by Fulton County Stadium so I could see where Hank had hit his record-breaking homer. Unfortunately, the Braves were on a road trip at the time; so instead of spending the evening at the ballpark, we had dinner at an Italian restaurant in Underground Atlanta, a now-long-vanished tourist attraction that managed to be both strange and strangely underwhelming.
It feels very weird to me that Hank's gone now, even though he had a long, full, heroic and rewarding life. His figure has always towered over baseball, or at least my perception of it, even though I never saw him play in person. I never met or interviewed him, either; and as I said to a friend the other day, I don't know what I could have possibly said to him had our paths ever crossed. It's like seeing the Grand Canyon in person — whatever comes to your lips will inevitably sound lame and insufficient.
My one great Hank Aaron story is actually a Neil Diamond story, and it didn't actually happen to me. In fact, it may not even be true, but it's too good not to share. It was told to me in the early 90s by a guy named David, who was a regular customer at See Hear, the record store I worked at in Chicago from 1989 to 1993...
In 1989, David was living in Atlanta, and a friend of his who was working as Neil Diamond's costume (or hair or makeup) person invited him to come and hang out backstage when Neil came to town and played the Omni. David was a friendly and easy-going guy, the kind of person you felt like you'd known forever the first time you met him, and Neil apparently took an immediate liking to him when they were introduced. After giving David a personal tour of his wardrobe and pointing out some of his favorite stage outfits, Neil invited David to join him, his band and crew for dinner, which was being catered by a local restaurant of note.
David happily accepted the invitation, and enjoyed the dinner immensely — at least up until the point when Neil turned to David and asked him, "David, how come there aren't more black people at my concerts?"
David just about choked on his food. For one thing, what a question! For another, David was just some white, Jewish dude from Georgia. "Why the hell is Neil even asking me this?" he thought to himself.
He chewed on the question — and its proper response — for a minute before answering. "No offense, Neil," he said, "but I just don't think black people like your music very much."
Neil, to his credit, did not act at all offended; he merely seemed mystified. "But why not?" he asked David, completely straight-faced. "I'm a SOUL singer!"
Flash forward to that night's show: David takes his seat, which — thanks to the hookup from his friend — is located right in the first couple of rows. He turns back to take in the rest of the arena, as one does in such situations, and immediately notices (much to his great surprise) that Hank Aaron and his wife are sitting directly behind him. David tries to play it cool; as naturally garrulous as he is, even he can't think of a way to break the ice and strike up a conversation with the legendary Home Run King. Still, he can't help himself from looking back from time to time throughout the evening to see what Hank is up to — and sure enough, Hank is genuinely digging the show, knows the words to all the songs, etc.
After the show, David goes backstage to say goodbye to his friend, and winds up passing Neil in the hallway.
"Hey Neil!" he shouts after him. "Hank Aaron was in the audience tonight!"
Neil stops in his tracks, punches the air and yells "YES!!!"
***
Oh, and speaking of baseball and Jewish guys from Georgia, my book with Ron Blomberg — The Captain & Me: On and Off the Field with Thurman Munson — will be released via Triumph Books on April 20, and is currently available for pre-order at Amazon.
One of my favorite things about spending summers with my grandparents in Alabama during the mid-to-late 1970s was watching the Atlanta Braves on WTCG/WTBS - the Braves were terrible back then, but it was still a treat to be able to see televised baseball broadcasts every night at a time when MLB's TV presence was limited in most markets to Game of the Week and Monday Night Baseball.
And the thing I loved most about watching the Braves were the games where Phil Niekro took the mound and baffled opposing hitters with his knuckleball. And honestly, I loved the games where he got lit up, too; I still smile looking at his 1979 stats, which include NL-leading totals in wins (21), losses (20), games started (44), complete games (23), innings pitched (342), hits (311), home runs (41), walks (113) and hit batters (11), along with very respectable ERA and strikeout numbers (3.39 and 208, respectively). And don't forget the number 40, which was how old he was that season.
Arguably the greatest knuckleballer of all time, "Knucksie" epitomized so much of what I loved about baseball in the 1970s - specifically the unpredictability of the game, and the unusual characters who played it. Here was a silver-haired guy who looked like he should have been working at some used car dealership in the Midwest, yet was calmly putting up some of the best numbers of his career at an age when most MLB hurlers would have long been put out to pasture.
I only got to see him pitch in person once, on my birthday in 1981 at Wrigley Field. It was a poor outing for him - he gave up 5 runs to the Cubs and was gone by the fifth inning - but it was still a thrill for me to watch him do his thing. I never met him, but by all accounts he was a friendly and charming chap who loved to shoot the bull with fans.
Rest in Peace, Knucksie; we will not see your likes again, but those of us who saw how your pitches danced will never forget it.
Yeah, it's been a rough year for most of us, with good news often in short supply. Happily, one of the big projects I've been working on came to fruition in 2020: Stompbox: 100 Pedals of the World's Greatest Guitarists, has now been officially released. Co-edited by James Rotondi and myself, and featuring the stunning photographs of Eilon Paz and written contributions from an impressive variety of musicians, music journalists and pedal aficionados, Stompbox is a deep dive into the culture and history of guitar effects pedals, exploring the many reasons and ways that guitarists (and other musicians) use them.
Stompbox features effects used by some of my personal favorite guitarists of all time, including Jimi Hendrix, Ernie Isley, Davie Allan, Marc Bolan and Mick Ronson — but it covers a wide stylistic spectrum which includes everyone from Tom Morello and Radiohead's Ed O'Brien (who wrote the book's foreword!) to Jack White and Dimebag Darrell. If you love guitar pedals and/or are fascinated by how gear plays into the creative process, this is a book you can get lost in for hours. But hey, don't just trust me on this — check out the sweet write-up the book recently received from WNET's ALL ARTS!
But wait, there's more! In the process of putting Stompbox together, Eilon and I began to come in contact with pedal aficionados whose collections contained some mind-glowingly rare and cool effects; though not specifically used by legendary guitarists, they definitely deserved to be showcased in a book of their own. Thus was born Vintage & Rarities: 333 Cool, Crazy and Hard to Find Guitar Pedals, which is available in a limited first edition run by itself, but can also be purchased in tandem with Stompbox as part of the slipcovered "Stompbox Brick" (so called because it's truly heavy on a variety of levels). If you have a guitar player on your Christmas list — or you're a guitar player who wants to give yourself a nice present (c'mon, you deserve it) — you really can't go wrong with either (or both) of these books!
And while you're at it, scroll down to the bottom of the Stompbox Shop page to enter The Stompbox Motherlode Giveaway, which includes pedals from JHS Pedals, Keeley Electronics, Death By Audio, Earthquaker Devices, Electro-Harmonix, AnalogMan, Walrus Audio, Strymon, Fairfield Circuitry, Wampler, Thorpy FX, Chase Bliss Audio, MXR, and Dunlop, as well as a yearly All-Access guitar lesson subscription from Trufire. The winner will be drawn on December 30, so be sure to enter before then. (And follow the Stompbox Instagram account for more opportunities to enter, as well as to see cool excerpts and outtakes from the books.)
Hope you're all staying safe and taking care of yourselves during these dark times. Hopefully we can all rock together again once summer rolls around!
I knew this was coming, but I still haven't been able to fully wrap my mind around it.
I don't remember ever learning about the existence of Tom Seaver, just like I don't remember learning about the existence of the Empire State Building; both were just always there, iconic symbols of the greatness of the city I'd been born into but didn't really begin to experience until I was almost 13. By then, of course, Tom was no longer there, having been shipped to the Reds in 1977 as part of the most heartbreaking trade in Mets (and maybe even MLB) history. And by then, seeing a Mets game at Shea Stadium was kind of like watching a Hubert Robert painting of Roman ruins come to life; you knew that greatness had previously occurred on these once-hallowed grounds, but actual traces of it could no longer be found anywhere on the field or in the neglected, urine-soaked structure.
I think I only got to see one Hall of Fame pitcher play in person while he was in his 70s prime: Jim Palmer, who efficiently beat my Tigers 3-1 with a complete game, 8-strikeout performance on April 24, 1977. And I got to see Luis Tiant, who SHOULD be in the Hall, throw a three-hit shutout against the A's that August. Both are among my most treasured 70s baseball experiences, but I really wish I could have somehow witnessed Seaver in action during his 1967-75 prime, that absolutely Olympian nine-year stretch where he won the NL Rookie of the Year award and three Cy Youngs while averaging 16 complete games and 233 strikeouts a season with a 2.46 ERA, and helped pitch the Mets to two pennants and one World Series championship. If I had to pick one pitcher from the era to take the mound for a crucial start, it would be that dude.
Still, I got to watch Seaver many times on TV from 1976 to 1979, when he was still pretty damn great; even when his fastball lost its zip, as it clearly had by 1979, he was such a tough and smart pitcher that you would have been foolish to bet against him.
But perhaps my fondest Seaver memory is of watching him pitch in an all-star softball game that was televised as part of (I think) ABC's Wide World of Sports during the spring training of 1977. Unlike his regular season starts, when he was "all business" on the mound, he was in total prankster mode that day—tossing a golf ball to one unsuspecting hitter, and lobbing an actual grapefruit to Thurman Munson, who duly (and grumpily) juiced that baby with a vicious swing...
My other favorite Seaver moment? This 1976 Sears ad for "The Travelknit Fourpiece," an Astroturf-colored set comprising a blazer, a leisure suit jacket, and two pair of trousers. In it, you can glimpse the many moods of Tom Seaver; the guy second from the right is clearly the grapefruit-throwing Seaver from the softball game, while the one at far-right appears to have wandered in from the set of The Rockford Files, where (in my dreams, at least) he's playing one of Jim's old army buddies who has sought him out for help with a business situation that is NOT WHAT IT SEEMS...
I don't know what else to say right now, other than I know how badly this must hurt for my Mets fan friends, especially the ones slightly older than me who grew up with Tom Terrific, and who got to see (or hear) their hero take the mound every fourth game. As rough as his trade to the Reds was for you folks, the news of his passing might be even rougher. Peace to you all, and to Tom Seaver, too.
Let me begin this piece by saying that my wife and I and those nearest and dearest to us are all currently Covid-free, for which I'm immensely grateful. (We'd also like to keep it that way, which is why we're both working from home right now, and venturing out only for walks and limited errands.) Let me also say that we are both lucky enough to be gainfully employed right now, and to live in a lovely rental house with a bird-and-tree-filled back yard, and we're quite cognizant that we have it pretty good compared to a lot of folks in this country and world right now.
So when I say that this is the first summer in our ten years together where we haven't taken a trip somewhere — even just for a long weekend getaway — I'm not asking you to feel sorry for us, but rather to understand why my brain suddenly seems to be more obsessed with traveling than ever. Now that our country's woefully inept and stubbornly idiotic response to this pandemic has turned cross-country travel into a decidedly dicey prospect for the foreseeable future (and has understandably rendered Americans persona non grata in quite a few countries), my mind is all a-churned with dreams and notions of where I'd like to go next, as well as memories of past trips both pleasantly mundane and profoundly life-altering. Thinking is the best way to travel, as the Moody Blues once sang, and I've certainly been thinking a lot lately... about traveling.
Memories of some of those "pleasantly mundane" journeys were kicked loose recently by the discovery of the above matchbook. For several years now, Katie has included a bag of vintage matchbooks among my Christmas stocking-stuffers; I always love sorting through them, picking out my favorites, and generally losing myself in the mental images of long-vanished bars, steakhouses and hotels that these tiny prizes conjure up.
This one from the Downtowner Motor Inn of Vicksburg, Mississippi initially eluded my notice, probably because its monochromatic presentation caused it to get lost in the shuffle amid the gaudier, foil-printed promotional items in my most recent bag o' 'books. But a few weeks ago, when I absent-mindedly grabbed it from the "okay to use" pile, I was immediately struck by combination of the adorable kitten (as I am a sucker for such things) and the flirtatious wink that accompanied the slogan "Hev Fun". And then there was the image and message on the inside:
"Commercial men and other pets welcome"? Was this an artifact from some sort of brothel that catered to traveling salesmen?
Well, not quite... but as this fantastic 2016 post from the Cardboard America blog reveals, there was definitely some adult-oriented action going down at Downtowner Inns in the 1960s and 70s. Founded in 1958 in Memphis, Tennessee, the Downtowner Corporation built motels in cities across the United States, usually within close proximity of major downtown hotels, arenas and convention centers. (The company's Rowntowner chain, introduced in 1967, concentrated on suburban locations.) While these were affordably-priced motels designed to target budget-minded tourists, businessmen and conventioneers, they definitely had more flair than you would have typically found in the Holiday Inns and TraveLodges of the day. Many of their buildings sported colorful, pop-art-inspired Mid-Century exteriors and signage, like these Downtowners from Kansas City and Albuquerque:
(The Downtowner Inn pictured at the top of this post is the one in Vicksburg, MS where my matchbook came from. Though that postcard doesn't catch the property from its most flattering angle — probably because management wanted to show off its expansive parking facilities — you can see that plenty of bright colors were used on its exterior, as well.)
Several Downtowner Inns also contained cocktail lounges and restaurants where things got a little more raucous and rowdy than at your local Howard Johnson's. Singles gatherings seemed to be a pretty commonplace occurrence, and some, like Tony's Restaurant at the Downtowner in Springfield, Illinois (pictured above), featured go-go girls; "modern dancers" Terri and Donna at the intriguingly-named Velvet Swing in the Atlanta Downtowner (advertised below) may have also been among their number. It's unclear from further research I've done whether or not the Vicksburg Downtowner offered similarly risqué entertainment options, but I'm guessing that the winking matchbook was an allusion to the affirmative.
I never stayed at a Downtowner as a kid (at least, I'm pretty sure I'd remember if I had), but going down the Downtowner rabbit hole brings back fond memories of the handful of cross-country road trips my sister and I (and sometimes our mom) took with our maternal grandparents during the 1970s, most of them across the South; we even stayed overnight in Vicksburg once, on our way to New Orleans from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Nothing terribly exciting or truly momentous happened on any of these trips (unless you count the time I left some newly-purchased 45s in a bag in the back window of Grandpa Fred's Buick LeSabre, with warp-tastic results), but the mental images I have from them still fill me with a sense of joy and well-being.
I remember feeling safe, comfortable and content in the air-conditioned splendor of that massive four-door sedan, watching the world go by as we played various word-association and -guessing games, or listened to my grandfather talk about the historical importance of places we were passing; though whenever he stopped the history lessons and started uttering the name of of every restaurant that came into view with long, drawn-out syllables ("Pooooonderooooosaaaa... Aaaaaarthuurrrr Treeeaaachers... Shooooney's Biiiig Booooy...") it was a sure sign that he was getting hungry.
I remember things like the brief ripple of excitement I felt whenever we pulled into the parking lot of the motel where we were going to spend the night, wondering what our room would look like, and anticipating the blissful evening of TV-watching and pop-drinking that would shortly ensue. Or feeling honored whenever my grandfather asked me to make a run to the ice machine, a device so wondrous that I immediately scoped out its location at every place we checked into. (Of course, the pop machine was almost always in close proximity to it, making such reconnaissance that much more important.)
And while I was a notoriously picky eater in those days, I always enjoyed going out for dinner with my grandparents at whatever restaurant or lounge was attached to the hotel. Though not fancy by any means, these establishments usually tried to at least give off a whiff of class and maybe even a little touch of the exotic to lift the spirits of the weary traveler. They were mellow (though maybe things got swinging there later on in the evening), dimly lit, with piped-in muzak and plenty of dark wooden paneling. I'd order my hamburger or fried shrimp, sink back into the tufted leather banquette, sip my ginger ale (with a maraschino cherry if the place was really classy), and imagine that I was a man of the world stopping briefly for refueling on the way to my next international adventure...
I miss those kinds of joints, all of which seem to have vanished from the face of the earth, replaced long ago by sports bars with blaring flat screens and chain restaurants of dubious quality and even worse service. I miss my grandparents. I miss my family. I miss my friends. I miss road trips. I miss traveling across the U.S. without worrying about running into bare-fanged MAGA bullshit at every turn. And I miss living in a nation where I don't wake up wondering what kind of grievous, infected, suppurating wound we're going to inflict upon ourselves today...
But I can still travel with my mind, and mean to do so until it's cool for the rest of me to hit the road again. So tonight, as I'm falling asleep, maybe I'll ask Grandpa Fred to steer the LeSabre towards the nearest Downtowner Inn. After all, you've gotta "Hev Fun" while you still can.
I am extremely proud and excited to announce that Ron "Designated Hebrew" Blomberg (#12 in this pic) and I have signed a deal with Triumph Books for a memoir of his Odd Couple-esque friendship with the man behind the plate — the late, great Yankees captain Thurman Munson.
Titled The Captain and Me, the book will reveal a lot about Thurman that isn't widely known (not to mention plenty of amusing/interesting tidbits from the glorious days of 70s baseball) and is currently slated for a 2021 release.
A huge thank you and/or a tip o' the Monsanto Toupee to everyone who has bought and supported my previous baseball books — you made this possible!
This is inarguably true from a literal standpoint (according to science, which the majority of us still believe in, these are unquestionably the shortest days of the year), but there's a metaphorical or even metaphysical aspect to December's darkness, as well. Sometime when I was around 11 or 12, I began to suspect that the bright, festive lights of Christmas and Hanukkah were not just lit in celebration of the holiday season, but also to keep something ominous at bay — much in the way that a campfire is lit not just for warmth, but also to ward off any fearsome creatures that may be silently lurking in the shadows.
This suspicion first really took shape for me on December 3, 1979, when 11 concertgoers were trampled to death while trying to see The Who at Cincinnati's Riverfront Coliseum. Before that infamous incident, music had always seemed pure and magical to me; I probably couldn't have articulated it as such at the time, but I essentially saw music as a transfer of positive energy from performer to listener that elevated both. The only times I'd vaguely (if at all) sensed that there were any darker forces embedded in or around it were whenever I heard "death songs" like Jody Reynolds' "Endless Sleep" or Ray Peterson's "Tell Laura I Love Her" on LA's oldies station KRLA, or imagined I'd picked up a whiff of something spookily portentous in the songs Buddy Holly recorded shortly before his plane went down in Clear Lake, Iowa. But that stuff was all from an era long gone; the immediacy of The Who concert tragedy, and the knowledge that these kids (who could have easily been me, my friends, or their older siblings) died while trying to experience what was supposed to be a joyful communal experience, seriously freaked me out. And that this horrific event had happened just three weeks before Christmas ("The Most Wonderful Time of the Year!") forever disabused me of the naive notion that music or the holidays were somehow magically impervious to the awful intrusions of real life.
Still, there was so much positive and exciting stuff happening in my life that December, the unsettled feelings I experienced in the wake of The Who tragedy didn't linger long. My mom, sister and I were gearing up to move from L.A. to Chicago at the end of the month, which was thrilling in itself; but on our way to the Windy City, my sister and I would take a holiday detour to New York City, where we would spend Christmas with our dad and then-stepmother. I had been born in NYC, but since we'd moved to Ann Arbor when I was just a little over a year old, I had never consciously experienced the wonder of the Big Apple during the Holidays — and holy moly, did it ever deliver.
My memories of Xmas '79 play back like a montage of stereotypical romantic "Christmas in NYC" images — attending the Rockettes' Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall, watching the ice skaters at the Rockefeller Center rink, buying roasted chestnuts from a vendor on Fifth Avenue, checking out the Christmas window displays at Macy's and Lord & Taylor — mixed with even richer, more life-affirming experiences. I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Egyptian wing for the first time, fully opened my eyes to the beauty and grandeur of the city's 1920s and 1930s architecture (Was that a Babylonian frieze atop the Fred F. French Building?!?), enjoyed the city's wealth of incredible radio stations and record stores, and learned about Max's Kansas City, which was located kitty-corner across Park Avenue South from my dad's apartment building. I had read a little about punk music, and was already digging some bands classified as "new wave" — Blondie, Talking Heads, B-52s — but hadn't yet felt remotely connected to any of it. But from my nocturnal perch in the living room window of my dad's south-facing eleventh-floor loft, I could watch the local scenesters coming and going from this legendary NYC nightclub, and feel like I was somehow part of the action, even if I was way too young to actually get inside.
I'd visited NYC a few times before, but my decades-long love affair with Manhattan really began during that trip; in retrospect, it's not too much of a stretch to say that a large part of the person I am today was forever molded by the six or seven amazing days I spent there that Christmas.
We went back to NYC for Christmas 1980, but the vibe and experience was entirely different. December's darkness had again fallen brutally hard, this time via John Lennon's assassination in front of the Dakota. It was horrifying enough that Lennon had been killed, and that his artistic light had been cruelly snuffed out just when he was beginning to let it shine again; but the fact that it happened in the city that he'd called home for the better part of a decade, which both embraced him as one of its own and — because he was one of its own — acted like it was no big fuckin' deal that he and Yoko could occasionally be seen around town, seemed to have genuinely shaken the Big Apple to its core. (Yeah, sorry about the pun, I know...) This New York Daily News headline really sums it up: It's not just John Lennon Slain, but John Lennon Slain Here. New Yorkers took that shit personally.
I could feel the shift in NYC's mood from the previous December almost as soon as we landed at JFK. Whereas the energy of Xmas '79 was very much the glitzy, disco-fied giddiness of a city still very much on the defiant rebound four years after President Ford had told it to drop dead, NYC circa Xmas '80 felt like a gigantic, barely-stifled sob. We made the rounds again to all the traditionally festive places, but there didn't seem to be much to actually celebrate; Ronald Reagan had been elected six weeks earlier, John Lennon was dead, and even this fourteen year-old could sense that an era was ending, and things were about to take a serious turn for the worse. It seemed like everywhere I went, every radio station I dialed in, was playing John and Yoko/Plastic Ono Band's "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)," a song of hope that now felt like a funeral dirge; and each time its kiddie chorus rang out, that choked sob of the city seemed poised to spill over into a gushing rush of heartbroken tears.
As I always did back then, I turned to the radio for escape, for deliverance from the gloom — though this time, with my station-changing hand perpetually poised to act in case of yet another spin of "Happy Xmas". There was one song in regular rotation on WPLJ which kind of snuck up on me; a song so low-key, I may not have even noticed it the first few times I heard it. It was "Skateaway," a single from Making Movies, the third and latest album from Dire Straits. I had liked "Sultans of Swing" during its hit run in late 1978 and early 1979, but I wasn't exactly a Dire Straits fan (in fact, I was completely unaware at the time of the existence of Communiqué, the band's second album). "Skateaway" changed that.
I didn't know that the song and album had been produced by Jimmy Iovine, who'd been behind the board for several of my favorite records from the last three years (including Bruce Springsteen's Darkness on the Edge of Town, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' Damn the Torpedoes, and Graham Parker and the Rumour's The Up Escalator), or that Mark Knopfler had been widely hailed as a new guitar hero. For the moment, all that mattered was the song's slinky groove, its clearly NYC-derived images of a rollerskating girl "slipping and a-sliding" her way through the city's traffic, and the way its music and lyrics gradually built to a spiritual celebration of the enchanting lure of urban life and the transcendent power of song.
Listening to "Skateaway" on headphones now, I'm struck by what a strange beast it is. With its tossed-off shuffles and last-minute fills, Pick Withers' drumming is wonderfully idiosyncratic in a way "they" haven't allowed rock drummers to be for decades, but the echo placed on his drums sounds unnecessary (and at times maybe even a little "off"). Aside from Knopfler's soaring single-note accents during the chorus (and his volume swells during the extended outro), Springsteen keyboardist Roy Bittan seems to carry most of the melodic weight of the song, while the admittedly impressive chicken-picking that Knopfler performs during the verses sometimes almost seems to have wandered into the wrong song. Vocally, Knopfler seems like he's laconically talk-singing a la Bob Dylan or J.J. Cale, but upon closer listens it becomes clear how much effort (and variations in tone and energy) he's putting into his performance. But heard all together through the half-dollar-sized mono speaker of my stepmother's radio/cassette player, it cohered into something spellbinding, evocative and irresistibly transportive. And more importantly, "Skateaway" allowed me to glimpse a little light amid the darkness I felt that December.
The song has been in my head again a lot lately, even soundtracking some of my dreams. I suspect it has something to do with this time of year, and the knowledge that so many of my friends — and so many people in general — are badly struggling right now. The appalling corruption of this current Presidential administration (and the equally appalling behavior of its staunchest supporters) would be tough enough to swallow under any circumstances, but that's obviously only part of the equation. So many people I know are wondering if it's all going to be downhill from here with their own lives, this country, or our civilization in general. Some are wondering if they'll ever work again; others if they or certain loved ones will even be alive to see next Christmas. I know that those kind of questions, never exactly easy to bear, become especially heavy during the darkness of December; and I certainly have no answers. All I have is a Christmas wish, which is that they (and you) will be able to find some daily comfort and joy amid the darkness — even if it's just via a song that, for a few minutes at least, will let you skate away. That's all.
I got the idea for this post from a recent online conversation I had with my friend and fellow author Joe Bonomo. Though we didn't actually meet until 2012, Joe and I have repeatedly bonded over how similar our formative experiences were; from music to baseball to teenage alienation, we were definitely on similar (and in some cases outright parallel) paths during our early years. But in the aforementioned chat, we discovered a very crucial difference: Joe was an Action Jackson man, while I was all about G.I. Joes. I suggested we write dueling blog posts about our childhood action figures, and here's my entry — you can read mine first, and then read Joe's, or you can read Joe's first and then come back to this one. Either way works for us!
45 years ago this week, if you’d asked me to name the three greatest things that had happened during the previous twelve months, I would have invariably replied with:
Nixon’s resignation
Blazing Saddles
“Kung-Fu Grip” G.I. Joe
1974 — what a time to be alive, right?
Of the three, Hasbro's introduction of "Kung-Fu Grip" probably had the biggest immediate impact on my life. I had been heavily into G.I. Joe since the May of 1973, when my friend Doug gave me a G.I. Joe Air Adventurer action figure — “with LIFE-LIKE HAIR and BEARD” trumpeted the box — for my seventh birthday. My mom, a staunch opponent of the Vietnam War, had previously refused to buy me anything G.I. Joe-related, despite my pitiful entreaties; still, she was wise enough to not make me return the present.
Besides, the Hasbro company — mindful of the growing anti-war sentiment among Americans — had recently repackaged Joe and his mates as a somewhat-less-objectionable “Adventure Team”. Sure, these fuzzy-headed dudes still had guns, grenades, flame-throwers, etc.; but these were all now employed in pursuit of “adventure,” instead of torching Vietnamese villages in order to save them from the evils of Communism. “It’s okay, Mom,” I told her. “He’s not a soldier — he’s an Air Adventurer!” I don’t recall her exact response, but I suspect that there was some eye-rolling involved.
Of course, like any impressionable American boy, I wanted my Air Adventurer to stockpile as many weapons as possible. The big problem was that, given the hard-plastic construction of his hands, it was exceedingly difficult to get him to hold on to any of his equipment, lethal or otherwise, in a functional or vaguely realistic manner. (This became even more difficult for my Air Adventurer after he fell from a tree branch in our Ann Arbor front yard and shattered his left arm.)
Therefore, Hasbro’s 1974 introduction of G.I. Joe dolls with “Kung-Fu Grip” — hands made of soft rubber, with fingers that could be manipulated individually — came as a total godsend to me. “They know that this is exactly what I need!” I marveled. All of my future G.I. Joes would now be able to shoot, stab, climb, schlep and give each other the “soul shake” in a far more secure and realistic manner. For the first time in my young life, I felt validated as a consumer.
When I moved to England that fall with my father and sister, however, a whole new world of “adventure” immediately opened up for me. Action Man, G.I. Joe’s Palitoy-licensed British counterpart, had not only introduced the “gripping hands” concept a whole year earlier, but he also came with a variety of realistic historic military uniforms and weapons as part of Palitoy’s “Soldiers of the World” series. (Holy shit — they even had an Action Man tank!) This absolutely blew my mind; now, instead of just shooting killer cobras and blowing up aggressive octopi, my G.I. Joes could stage actual World War II combat scenarios!
Of course, to fully stage said combat scenarios, my G.I. Joes — now fully attired and armed with period-perfect British and American WWII infantry gear — required an opponent to fight against. To say that my father was displeased when he learned I wanted to spend my allowance on a German stormtrooper uniform set would be to woefully understate the case, but I was adamant that this was exactly what I wanted. “But Dad, G.I. Joe needs an enemy,” I insisted. He okayed the purchase in the end, though also (I’m sure) with no small amount of eye-rolling.
When we returned to Ann Arbor the following year, my Action Man gear was the talk of all my G.I. Joe-loving elementary school pals, most of whom thought I was making up the part about the existence of an Action Man tank (alas, I couldn’t afford to bring one back with me as proof). How was it possible that British kids could have their Action Men reenact the Battle of the Bulge with miniature STEN guns and "potato masher" grenades, while our G.I. Joes had been relegated to searching for buried treasure and engaging in mildly strenuous desert rescues? It seemed grossly unfair.
Nevertheless, I hit it harder than ever with G.I. Joe in 1975, acquiring (mostly via Christmas and birthday gifts) a helicopter, a submarine, and the Adventure Team Training Center, along with various other outfits and equipment. I had the Training Center set up in the basement of the first house we rented upon our return, with the “training slide” cord stretched halfway across the room, and a makeshift landing pad for the copter. Even though I was convinced that the house (especially its basement) was haunted, I still happily spent countless hours down there performing an endless array of G.I. Joe maneuvers. My mania for all things G.I. Joe-related would last another two years or so, until my enthusiasm for sports finally outstripped all my other interests. The turning point was probably the Christmas of 1976, when I fished a pecan out of my grandmother’s holiday nut dish expressly for the purpose of having my G.I. Joes play football with it.
My friends and I admittedly enjoyed additional dalliances with other action figures — like the Johnny West, Steve Austin and Evel Knievel collections — but G.I. Joe was our main man. There were two realms we never entered into, however: Big Jim and Action Jackson. The latter did seem kind of cool (he had some sweet accessories, and that “bold adventure is my game” song from his TV commercials was catchy and fairly stirring), but those AJ figures were just too damned small for our G.I. Joe-sized world. And the commercials for the former always played like scenarios lifted straight from one of the more "open-minded" reader letters that popped up from time to time in my dad’s Penthouse magazines. (“Dear Penthouse: I never thought these letters were real, but last week I went camping with my buddy Big Jim, and we met this guy with a rugged face and a strange tattoo…”) The way Big Jim could bust a strap with his bicep was admittedly impressive, but his whole "hyper-masculine outdoorsman" trip just wasn’t my thing.
So yeah, G.I. Joe was where it was at for me. The gear, the outfits, the play sets — it all just seemed so superior to everything else that was out there, even if it didn’t fully sate my childhood lust for historic combat like Action Man’s stuff did. I finally sold (or, more likely, gave away) all my G.I. Joe/Action Man toys in the fall of 1978, as part of the preparations for my dad moving back to NYC to live with my then-stepmother, and my sister and I moving to L.A. to live with my mom. I know all that stuff would be worth a fortune now, but Joe and I had reached the end of our road long before that; and anyway, most of my figures had already lost some or all of the fingers from their “Kung-Fu Grip” hands, and there would never be much of a resale market for Leprosy G.I. Joe.
Even though we wouldn’t have much to say to each other now, I still think of G.I. Joe every year about this time. The sweet childhood memories of the holiday season come flooding back, and once again I’m sprawled across the floor of one of our Ann Arbor living rooms, listening to Christmas music on the radio, paging through the Sears and JC Penney catalogs, and trying to decide which G.I. Joe stuff I want to add to my Christmas wish list. Eight Ropes of Danger? The Five-Star Jeep? The Mobile Support Vehicle? Guess I’d better put 'em all on there, just in case…
There are over 34,000 graves in Rosehill Cemetery, the largest cemetery in the City of Chicago. Those interred at the sprawling North Side burial ground include captains of industry, Civil War infantrymen, fifteen Chicago mayors, sixteen U.S. Congressmen, half a dozen 19th century baseball figures, and legendary sportscaster Jack Brickhouse. “Louise is somewhere in there, too,” my mom told me, right around the time I moved back to Chicago in 2015.
Louise was not quite a relative, but much more than just a family friend. My mom, sister and I first met her in January 1980, shortly after we’d moved from Los Angeles to join my then-stepfather in Chicago. We’d just finished hauling the last of our stuff into our new 9th floor apartment in the Mies Van Der Rohe-designed glass box at 910 N. Lake Shore Drive, when Louise (who was friendly with my stepfather) invited us to lunch at her apartment somewhere on the upper floors of our building’s next-door twin. Despite knowing almost nothing about her in advance, I had a weird premonition on our way to her place that she was going to play a very important role in my life — a premonition which turned out to be right on the money. A tiny, worldly, hilariously ribald widow in her early seventies, Louise was warm and welcoming to us from the moment we met. She and my mom hit it off immediately, and soon formed a deep bond that would last for over a decade. Louise and I clicked as well, once we each realized that the other was deeply interested in art, architecture and (especially) archaeology.
The shelves of Louise’s living room, whose floor-to-ceiling windows offered a gorgeous panoramic view of Lake Michigan, were filled with books on the aforementioned subjects, not to mention a wide array of ancient artifacts from around the globe. Soon I was going over to her place by myself on a regular basis, and we’d spend hours discussing everything from Bauhaus architecture and surrealist art, to Greek and Roman myths and the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt, to her extensive and eventful travels in pre-WWII Europe. Despite the fact that I was only thirteen, Louise spoke to me like I was a learned adult, as opposed to an adolescent whose enthusiasm for these topics far outstripped his actual knowledge. When I graduated from the eighth grade that spring, Louise’s gift to me was a copy of Immanuel Velikovsky’s Oedipus and Akhnaton. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that not too many other eight graders received the same graduation gift that year…
The intellectual confidence that our friendship instilled in me turned out to be especially significant, as my stepfather — threatened by the closeness of my relationship with my mom — would spend the next two years doing everything he could to eradicate any semblance of self-esteem I might possess. When my mom (who certainly had her own issues with him) finally got fed up and moved us out, all the friends we’d made through my stepfather immediately dropped us — all of them except for Louise, that is. She sided firmly with the three of us, and did whatever she could to be helpful and supportive as my mom gutsily rebuilt her own life and ours.
I confess that, as much as I appreciated Louise’s love and encouragement, I found her presence increasingly difficult to take as I grew older. Louise would think nothing of enlivening a dinner conversation by, say, bringing up an artist she knew in 1930s France who would mix paints with his own shit to achieve a particularly impressive shade of brown; and she could always be counted to kick it up several notches when we were out in public, to flirt madly with any man we encountered, and maybe even “misappropriate” a wine glass, cutlery or some other grabbable item when no one was looking. I was desperately craving some kind of order in my life, and Louise represented chaos to me — charming and massively entertaining chaos, of course, but chaos nonetheless. I can vividly remember her advancing towards me through the crowd at a post-show reception for one of my high school plays, and me feeling both genuinely happy to see her, yet also silently praying that this pint-sized dynamo with the flashing eyes and crimson lipstick wouldn’t do anything to embarrass me.
I don’t recall seeing much of Louise while I was in college, but thankfully we managed to reconnect during the few years between my graduation and her passing. Never exactly a robust physical specimen to begin with, she was now exceptionally frail, but her personality and sense of humor remained as atomic-powered as ever; slightly more grown up and considerably less uptight than I’d been in my high school days, I could now just relax and enjoy our time together. When she died in 1992, after struggling with a variety of illnesses, my mom was there at her bedside. “Daniel — that’s my guy,” Louise told her. She left me her lime-green couch, a heavy stack of archaeology books, and an antique brass nutcracker in the form of a pair of female legs, which was really about the most “Louise” item imaginable.
A lovely memorial gathering was held at Louise’s apartment, where I’d spent so many wonderful afternoons hearing her stories. But I have no memory of there being a funeral, and I had no idea of what happened to her remains until my mom mentioned her in conjunction with Rosehill. Now that I was living in Andersonville, only a twenty-minute walk from the cemetery, I thought I might try to find her grave and pay my respects.
Unfortunately, my mom was pretty sure that Louise’s ashes resided somewhere in Rosehill’s gigantic two-story mausoleum — and most likely in a section devoted to the maternal side of her family, whose name we’d both completely forgotten after two-plus decades. And while I occasionally went for meditative, head-clearing strolls through the cemetery, the mausoleum’s doors always seemed to be locked whenever I visited...
My move back to Chicago, after twenty-three years in Southern California, was a positive one on many levels: I reconnected with old friends, made a few new ones, enjoyed some quality time with my mom, finally banished some lingering ghosts from my difficult adolescence, and somehow even managed to show up in time to witness the Cubs win their first World Series in over a century. But on a professional level, it was a total, deeply dispiriting bust. One promising work opportunity after another either slipped through my fingers or blew up in my face; the countless job applications I sent out resulted in only a small handful of interviews; and none of the book proposals I was writing seemed to be getting any traction. So in the fall of 2017, when a book agent I knew reached out about maybe helping hair-metal veteran Chip Z’Nuff pen his memoirs, I immediately said yes. The project was kind of a long-shot, given that Chip’s band Enuff Z’Nuff didn’t exactly have the name recognition of, say, Motley Crue or Guns N’ Roses; but I figured I’d at least get some funny rock n’ roll stories out of him — and maybe we’d even get lucky and land a book contract with a decent advance…
After a brief preliminary meeting with Chip at the Chicago Recording Company, he invited to come down to his house in Blue Island for a lengthier discussion of the project. Unfortunately, I didn’t own a car; and since riding the CTA all the way down to Blue Island from the North Side would take hours (and maybe wouldn’t be the safest course of action), I decided to rent some wheels for the weekend. But as the Enterprise outlet near me had recently jacked up their rental rates, I had to turn to their considerably cheaper branch over at the corner of Western and Peterson, right across from the northwest corner of Rosehill Cemetery. Two days later, when I returned the car to the branch, the Enterprise people offered me a lift home, but I declined. The early October morning was a spectacularly beautiful one, and I didn’t have any pressing deadlines, so I thought I’d treat myself to a leisurely walk home through Rosehill.
Unlike Graceland, which is built on a perfectly rectangular lot, Rosehill warps outward along its southern border as it proceeds to the west, and none of the cemetery’s paved paths or roads resemble anything close to a straight line. These factors, combined with the sheer vastness of the place, make it pretty easy to lose your bearings, even if you’ve been there many times. On this particular morning, I entered the western end of Rosehill via the Bryn Mawr Avenue gate, which I’d never done before; I took a left at the first fork in the pathway I came to, a right at the next, and so on, slowly wending my way more or less in the direction of the Ravenswood Avenue entrance on the other side. Though this part of the cemetery was pretty unfamiliar to me, I figured I’d eventually see some recognizable landmarks that would help guide me to the other end.
I had originally intended to walk straight home, but since the day was starting to get fairly warm, and my wife was texting me with questions about our Thanksgiving travel plans, I decided to find a shady place where I could stop and sit for a few minutes. I noticed a small Egyptian Revival-style mausoleum coming up on my left — after all these years, I’m still a sucker for ancient Egyptian design motifs — so I walked over and sat down on its cool front steps. I immediately felt very relaxed and happy sitting there, so I decided to hang out for a while and savor the moment, letting my eyes wander dreamily over the tranquil landscape of gravestones, tombs, obelisks and colorful trees.
To keep myself company on the walk, I’d been listening to “Lord Queensbury’s Codpiece,” a Spotify playlist I’d compiled of over two thousand tracks of 1960s British psychedelia, to be played in shuffle mode. The combination of jaunty melodies, fanciful lyrics and pastoral introspection meshed perfectly with both the warm autumn day and the melancholy atmosphere of the cemetery. Even more perfectly than I could have expected, in fact: For while I was relaxing there on the steps of the mausoleum, “Egyptian Tomb” by Mighty Baby suddenly popped on, as if to make sure I was aware of where I was sitting. It was an odd and eerie coincidence, to say the least.
Thinking this might be some sort of sign, I looked up at the name carved into the front of the mausoleum — Ferdinand Siegel — and decided to check Google for any interesting information I might be able to find out about my “host”. There wasn’t much out there, however; Mr. Siegel appeared to have been a German-born real estate investor who’d died in 1928 at the age of 79, presumably after having done well enough in his new country to build an impressive monument to himself. But compared to the fascinating stories of some of Rosehill’s other “residents,” the basic facts of Mr. Siegel’s life didn’t seem to warrant further research. So, feeling refreshed and ready to head home, I put my phone back into my jacket pocket and got up to go.
After I'd walked about ten feet back towards the road, it suddenly occurred to me that I hadn't actually looked into the mausoleum. Tombs of this size and era typically include a stained-glass rear window, and I silently scolded myself for nearly passing up the possibility of spying some beautiful 1920s glass work. I headed back to the Siegel tomb, walked up its front steps, and peered through the bars of its oxidized iron doors; sure enough, I could see a gorgeous stained glass window set into the far wall, depicting the Nile flowing languidly past a palm-dotted landscape, as if seen through a pair of ancient Egyptian “papyrus” columns. I took a photo of the window, then tried to make out the name plates on the wall below it.
The third one down read, "Louise E. Mora, 1908 -1992". It was Louise. Our Louise.
I stood there in shock for several minutes, first weeping, then laughing. Somehow, in this 350-acre repository of over 34,000 remains, I had found her — or maybe, she had found me.
Cynics reading this will say it was all just a lucky series of coincidences that led me to Louise’s grave. And perhaps it was. But if I hadn’t decided to take a chance on a Chip Z’Nuff book project (which also never panned out, unfortunately), hadn’t needed to rent a car, hadn’t been forced to go to a cheaper rental outlet, hadn’t refused their offer of a ride home, hadn’t taken several semi-arbitrary turns along a series of cemetery pathways I was only vaguely familiar with, hadn’t needed to answer Katie’s texts, hadn’t decided to rest in the shade at that very spot, and hadn’t suddenly thought to walk back and check out the mausoleum’s stained glass… well, that’s rather a lot of coincidences, isn’t it? And really, what were the odds of “Egyptian Tomb” coming up, out of over two thousand songs, shortly after I’d sat down?
“I was born in a world that can easily bring you down,” goes the first line of “Egyptian Tomb”. But for all the soul-crushing horror, cruelty and disappointment of this world, I can hereby attest that there’s still some magic left in the universe. Louise proved it to me on that warm October morning, from her resting place along the banks of a stained-glass Nile.
Dan Epstein is the author of Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging '70s and Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of '76, both published by Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press. He writes about baseball, music and other cultural obsessions for a variety of outlets and publications. He lives in Greensboro, NC, and is available for speaking engagements.