Years on the 7s #5: 1987, 1997, 2007

Details from the years 1987, 1997 and 2007 won't readily come to mind without some assistance. Dates of vacations and physical ailments are fuzzy.

For instance, did we spend that week at Sandals resort in Antigua in 2007 or 2008? Was it 1997 or another year when I had to forego booze for an entire North by Northwest Music Conference because I was taking antibiotics to recover from diverticulitis?  

To do 1987 justice, I'll need to go to Buffalo News microfilm to figure out everything I was doing, since the online archives cut off at 1988. Gusto is my diary, but the high points go like this:

Monica and I buy our second house together – a big Victorian single built in 1891 on a corner lot at 429 Richmond Ave. I've driven past it for years and never noticed it behind the two big trees in the front yard. It's in wonderful condition and the price is right. $107,000. In June, we move in.

We can afford it because of the rents we generate from our old house – a four-unit place that we've had since 1979 five blocks away at 180 Richmond. There we tried our hand at landscaping and made the place into a San Francisco-style painted lady, startling the neighbors when we turned it pumpkin orange with deep red highlights.
Second-floor tenant Joe Ciminese comes to me in July to complain about the marijuana plant growing under our old kitchen window in the side yard. Don't know where it came from – I didn't plant it – but it's a beauty. I dig it up and nurse it to sticky-bud maturity on the garage roof at 429, but it turns out not to be very potent.

I'm still driving my troublesome white 1979 diesel VW Rabbit, the last car I acquire brand new until 2016. It's on its fifth engine and its fifth radio/cassette player. It attracts thieves even after I put an alarm in it,

For landlording, there's a pickup truck, a ratty grey 1979 Dodge half-ton without a tailgate that I got cheap at a repo auction. My friend Kim Ziegler, who put a few extra dents in it, called it the "fuck truck."

Monica, if I recall correctly, has a perfectly respectable 1980 Honda Accord and is working for Computer Task Group as a contractor. They have great parties.

It's the year of Prince's "Sign 'O' the Times" and U2's "Joshua Tree" and R.E.M.'s single, "It's the End of the World as We Know It." I'm pre-recording a half-hour show about current music for WBFO-FM, the NPR station. It airs Friday nights. 

And on my desk in the Features Department at The Buffalo News, I have a big honking Sony multi-tasking tuner/record player/cassette player and dubbing deck, on which I review new releases when I'm working late into the night. (Every Thursday night, for instance, I proofread every word in Gusto to weed out the typographical errors.) This may also be the year that I'm finally obliged to add a Sony Discman player to combination. 

1997

For this one, the best jog of the memory will be that year's little black DayMinder notebook. Without looking at it, here's the best of what I recall.

Still have the rental property at 180 Richmond. It's where I put all my gardening efforts. The house at 429 Richmond doesn't get any sun.

I'm golfing a lot, primarily with friends Bob and Pat Riley and a foursome that includes the actor Richard Hummert, his brother-in-law Tony Harasimowicz and Kavinoky Theatre director David Lamb. We hop around to a lot of different courses, but our favorite spot is the Niagara Golf Club outside Niagara Falls, Ont.

What am I driving? This may be that time when I don't have a car at all, just that white 1989 Dodge D-50 pickup truck, another cheapo repo, but nicer.  

No longer the rock critic at The Buffalo News, no longer recording weekly items for WBFO, but still deeply involved in the biz via my little music-related company, Hot Wings Entertainment, which I set up after I stopped working with Ani DiFranco in 1994.

This year sees the release of the second Alison Pipitone CD on the Hot Wings label, "Down to Money." I get her a showcase in the North by Northeast Music Conference in Toronto.

I attend South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, for the fifth straight year, having started there in 1992 with Ani DiFranco. Carl Perkins is the keynote speaker.

For the Folk Alliance conference in Toronto, I run a showcase for upstate New York artists, some from Buffalo, some from Rochester, in a hotel room in conference headquarters in the Westin Harbor Castle. Biggest thrill is when Pete Seeger stops by to listen.

2007

Another year that needs a look at the DayMinder, but this much is for sure. I'm 65 and retirement is out of the question. It's a year of fiscal distress. The reason? I've been unwisely helping out my contractor friend, Michael Foglia, who assisted with repairs at our rental property until we sold it in 2001 and continues at our current place.

Michael is a house painter with a keen eye for custom colors, which is why we hooked up with him. A couple of his houses appear in the third edition of "Painted Ladies." He's also a hard luck case.

His tools get stolen. He needs money to finish a job. He's gotten stiffed by a customer. Someone is ailing in his family – his two kids, their spouses and their kids all live with him. His electricity is getting shut off. He's in trouble with the taxman. I loan him anywhere from a couple hundred bucks to a couple thousand every week or two. Over the years, it's added up.

        I do it by borrowing from my credit cards, banking on Michael's promise that he'll get paid six figures by the rich dentist he's working for on Lincoln Parkway. And in these pre-global financial crisis days when fresh credit card offers show up in the mail every week, I tap into new ones to keep up with the old ones.

I also go that route for personal emergencies. In 2006, when the air conditioning broke in my 1990 Toyota Corolla, I pay for my next ride, a 2000 Toyota RAV-4, the only decent car I can find for less than five figures after searching for two months, with a cash advance from a card.

By this point, I have more than two dozen of them. The minimum monthly payments are $1,000 more than my take-home pay. I can't afford South by Southwest this year and skip it for the first time since 2000. Same for the Folk Alliance conference. I'm dead in the water.

Nor can I afford to go golfing as much anymore. I've taken up duplicate bridge, a much less expensive pastime that doesn't depend on the weather. I'm playing almost every day and piling up master points.

Meanwhile, there is the passing of one of my more colorful Buffalo News colleagues, Lonnie Hudkins, a talkative 80-year-old Texan with CIA connections who knew who really killed JFK.

Lonnie also was Olaf Fub, longtime custodian of a random notes column called "Reporters' Notebook," which had been passed around the newsroom before he took it over in the late 1980s.
It looks like it will die with him, but there's such an outpouring of support and affection at his wake that managing editor Margaret Sullivan has a change of heart.  

So there's a new Olaf Fub. Me.

I keep the format and brighten it up. I look for pithy lead-off quotes. I give the items about chicken dinners and other fundraisers a feature-y tweak. I sprinkle local celebrities and friends into the happy birthday wishes. The column revives. I start enjoying my alternative identity. I sign my email responses "Olaf Jr."

Years on the 7s #4: 1967

        On its 50th anniversary, much can be made of 1967. It's a vivid year. Summer of Love. "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." The debut of Rolling Stone magazine.

Against the backdrop of the escalating Vietnam War, the counter culture is in full flower power. Its epicenter, San Francisco, beckons. From a distance in Fredonia and Buffalo, I resonate with the excitement of the era. Every day is a brave new world.

However, having reached a quarter century on the planet, I'm a little too responsible, a little too plugged in, to grow my hair to my shoulders, pull up stakes and head west.

This is the year that the Dunkirk Evening Observer makes me Fredonia Bureau chief, complete with office over the Liberty Bank branch in the center of town. It's a one-man bureau. My accounts of the contentious Village Board meetings increase attendance at them.

I have a reportorial rival in the formidable person of Agnes Palazzetti, who writes for The Buffalo News and seems to know everyone in the county. A year later she will encourage me to get a job in Buffalo.

I have a cheap, drafty second-floor apartment on the corner of West Main Street and Canadaway Street, rented from the father of Ross Scanio, a high school friend who lived across the landing when I first moved in. On the other side of the alley is the Henry Hotel, where fights regularly spill out the back door. 

The narrow living room, which I painted a vibrant dark blue with white woodwork, is big enough to accommodate a rolltop desk that belonged to my grandfather, who died in 1961. Across the back wall there's a growing record album collection crowding my award-winning college book collection on shelves made of concrete blocks and boards. 
Centerpiece is a lumpy, pull-out couch that used to sit in the playroom at my parents' house. After the Alco plant in Dunkirk closed in the early '60s, they sold the farm. Now they're in Annville, Pa., near Hershey and my father's welding job with Cleaver Brooks, a boiler factory in Lebanon, Pa.
I'm the last of our family in Fredonia. Brother Tom became the first of us to get married, to Karen, in the summer of 1965, finished up at Purdue University by the following January and is an engineer for B. F. Goodrich in Akron, Ohio. My other brother, Bill, graduated from Fredonia High School in 1966 and is studying engineering at Penn State. 

I'm driving a light blue 1967 Volkswagen Beetle, successor to the beloved light blue 1957 Beetle I rolled over at 55 mph on an icy curve the previous November with my friend Nancy Lazarczyk riding shotgun. Miraculously, in those days before seat belts, we were unhurt. 

There's also a motorcycle, my second one, a black Honda 165 with megaphone mufflers that the previous owner installed. In the winter, I stash it in my bedroom, which is bigger and draftier than the living room.

This also is the year that I connect with the first profound love of my life, the woman who two years later will become my wife.

Laura Zuckerman is a junior at Fredonia State College and more than a passing acquaintance when we run into one another over green beer on St. Patrick's Day at the Colonial Inn, a collegiate watering hole on Main Street. She's the ex-girlfriend of a good friend of mine, Bill Miller.

One of the happiest moments that spring is when Laura tells me she's gotten a new prescription for birth control pills. 
This prompts me to break off another relationship – a three-way affair involving a couple in Westfield. Pipe-smoking Phil Abrams, who works at Welch's (was it in the lab?), subscribes to the Playboy philosophy and for several months has taken an odd pleasure in sharing his sweet wife Linda with me. My friends, who openly disapprove of this arrangement, are glad to see it end.

I know Phil and Linda from Alvin's Hideaway, a candlelit coffeehouse in Dunkirk presided over by Alvin Scime, flamboyant and gay with his shaved head, his beret, his cape and his Citroen. He's a scandal in a traditional Polish Catholic neighborhood (the parish priest preaches against him from the pulpit) and he aggravates the neighbors even more because he speaks better Polish than they do.

My best friend, Dan Cudney, a lingering connection from high school, introduced me to Alvin's shortly after I returned home from Syracuse University in 1964. A man of well-cultivated talents and obsessions, Dan taught himself guitar by mastering a Bach cantata and performs at Alvin's. A rudimentary folksinger and guitarist myself, I pair up with him for Bob Dylan songs.

We evolve into a group and become an attraction at Alvin's. By 1967, Dan is firmly settled into Buffalo's Elmwood Avenue district and his girlfriend, Kathy Notley, an office clerk at Sears on Main Street, is singing with us. Our lineup also includes a drummer, David Sipos, one of Kathy's boyfriends, and Ron Magrum, a Fredonia State student who plays guitar and started hanging with us at Alvin's.

We rehearse at night in Kathy's basement apartment in a big old mansion on Soldiers Place, a Frederick Law Olmsted circle near Delaware Park. And we've been branching out from Alvin's. My rollover accident occurs on the way home from a gig in the Leon Hotel, a country bar on U.S. Route 62 in Cattaraugus County.

Being pot smokers, for a while we call the band the Nickel Bag. And in the manner of the Beatles and other bands of the era, we hang out together a lot. We go on stoned romps to local attractions like Chautauqua Institution and Griffis Sculpture Park and the Lake Erie beaches.

Our most ambitious excursion is a vacation trip to Cape Cod, Dan and (I'm pretty sure) Kathy in his Beetle, Laura and me in mine. We bask in the presence of Richie Havens at an amazing concert in a little coffeehouse in Provincetown.

Our other big adventure is a trip to Toronto to see two of our idols at the O'Keefe Center, the San Francisco hippie bands Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. Kathy bears a distant resemblance to the Airplane's Grace Slick and does a great version of her signature song, "Somebody to Love." In our sets, it's always a high point. 

Years on the 7s #3: 1957

1957! The second Eisenhower Administration. The year of Sputnik and cars with tailfins.

The folks have a blue and white four-door 1955 Chevy 210, which I yearn to drive. Oh, how I yearn. Oh, how I want them to buy one of those cool 1957 Chevys.

And then there's that black four-door 1934 Buick sitting at the back of the used car lot at Dengler Chevrolet in Fredonia. I visit it regularly. I do sketches of it. I wish I had enough money to buy it. Eventually it disappears.

I also wish I had enough money to get us a television set. We're the only family anywhere without TV. My mother is a holdout. If you want a TV, she says, you'll have to go out and buy one.

Yes, I've emerged as a full-fledged teenager. This is the year my pre-adolescent occupations fall away.

No more piano lessons. No more afternoons listening to New York Yankee games on the radio and keeping running box scores on the blackboard in our playroom. No more Dunkirk Evening Observer paper route (a five-mile slog by bicycle), no more Boy Scouts (I'm five merit badges short of Eagle), no more summer week at Boy Scout Camp Merz on Chautauqua Lake.

I'm getting allergy shots (feathers, corn) from my father. And perhaps still getting haircuts from him too. Not only am I picking grapes in the fall, I'm also pulling brush in the vineyard in the early spring after my father and grandmother prune the vines.

The money I earn goes to buy paperback books like "The Catcher in the Rye," Mad magazine, the Sunday Courier-Express (for the comics) and 45 rpm singles.

I listen to rock 'n roll constantly on the Buffalo stations, primarily a deejay named Hernando on WXRA (later WINE), which I favor because it broadcast the Yankee games. I follow the hits on the Billboard charts, torn from the magazine and posted weekly on the wall in Willsey's, the card shop-cum-record store in downtown Fredonia, and create my own charts as well.

1957 is the peak year for early rock 'n roll. Elvis. Chuck Berry. The Everly Brothers. The Coasters. Jerry Lee Lewis. Even Ricky Nelson and Pat Boone (I got a pair of the shoes he wore, white bucks). And a group called the Crickets, led by a guy named Buddy Holly.

End of my sophomore year at Fredonia High School, beginning of junior year, I'm an A student, equipment manager and scorekeeper for the baseball team.

I stop being a farm kid from Sheridan and start having friends in town. I ride the bus to school, but don't always take it home.

Sometimes I get to hang and drink Cokes with my classmates after school in overloaded booths at the Park Diner in the center of the village. There are football games and basketball games and Friday night dances in the gym.

I'm smitten with Leana Kantor, exotic and buxom, one of the few Jewish students in the school and the only classmate who's younger than me. I carry her books and walk her home sometimes, spend occasional after-school afternoons at her house and wish we'd be more than platonic. She introduces me to "West Side Story," the cartoons in the New Yorker and cigarettes. Parliaments, with the recessed filters.

Our big adventure is on Christmas Eve, when we get served cocktails at the bar in the venerable White Inn. I skip midnight services with the family at the Methodist Church in Dunkirk. When I hitchhike home, they aren't back yet. I crawl woozily into bed and pretend to be asleep when they arrive, but they don't want to wait till morning to open presents under the tree. They roust my surreptitiously half-drunk ass down to the living room for the unwrapping. 

Years on the 7s #2: 1947

What about the other years ending in 7? Let's go deep, back to 1947.

This is the year I go from being a little 4-year-old kid at home to being a little 5-year-old kid in school, starting kindergarten at Sheridan No. 8, the two-room school at the end of our grape vineyard.

I jump straight from kindergarten to second grade in 1948, precocious little brat that I am. I demonstrate my brilliance by studying the calendar and telling people what day of the week a particular date is later in the year.

I have one brother, Tom, two years younger, who's my playmate, and mom is expecting. My father's widowed mother, Albertina, born in 1877 and who talks to my dad in her native Swedish, lives with us and babysits.

We're out in the country in a big brick 19th century Italianate house on a busy corner. Three miles down U.S. Route 20 to Fredonia. Three miles down State Route 39 to Dunkirk and the Alco plant where my father works as a welder. 

We have cats. We have chickens in our chicken coop. We have a Farmall Cub tractor in the barn. We grow strawberries, raspberries, cherries, peaches, corn, string beans and grapes, lots of grapes. Three acres of them. 

We have radio, with soap operas and comedy shows and hit novelty songs like "Open the Door, Richard," "Smoke, Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette" and "Peg of My Heart" in harmonica and accordion versions.

        We have a party-line telephone, a Fredonia number, shared among eight households. 

        We have a 1939 Chevy business coupe, the one with no back seat, just a rubber mat. Tom and I sit back there on little wooden stools for those trips to visit mom's parents in Sheffield, Pa., in the spring and at Thanksgiving or Christmas.

Tucked among hills, Sheffield is a tiny town, so small that there's only one insurance agent, Grandpa John Keller. He drives a pre-war Packard. Mom's mother had a stroke a couple years earlier. Her name was Mable, and we called her the Grandma Who Walks With a Cane. She died in 1946. My grandfather would remarry and outlive his second wife too, who we always call by her name, Dora. 

Years on the 7s #1: 1977

NPR's Morning Edition noted on Aug. 4 that this is the 40th anniversary of the founding of the U.S. Department of Energy and it sent my mind back to the first year of the Carter Administration, which in retrospect turns out to be when my adult life kicked into high gear.

The Buffalo News has just started Gusto, the weekend entertainment mag, and I finally have the job I wanted as a full-time feature writer and critic.

Monica, whom I met the summer before, has graduated from UB and decides to get a flat with her girlfriends and stay in town.

I stop thinking about moving to California. Despite the Blizzard of '77 that January, it can't be any sweeter than Buffalo.

I have a Porsche 356c, a Honda 450 motorcycle, an orange VW Thing with the top down all summer, two pussycats – Emily and Becky – and that funky attic apartment on Auburn Avenue. Who could ask for anything more?

And there is more.

A water bed.

Grapefruit trees that grew from seeds in a bag of grapefruits I brought back from Florida after a trip south in the Porsche with good friend Barbara Rose a year earlier. Four of those trees still reach for the ceiling from pots in the former Features Department, now the IT Department, at The Buffalo News.

A landscaped front lawn at 562 Auburn Ave. which I created two years earlier, a novelty in those days before Buffalo developed a garden fetish.  

A secret gig with 97 Rock (WGRZ-FM) as a concert reviewer, prerecorded on the morning show, under an assumed name. I'm Dempster Bucks. At least until around the end of July, when the radio-TV writer on the rival paper, the Courier-Express, outs me in his column right after I write a piece for The News about departing program director John McGhan. The News suspends me without pay for a week as punishment, but keeps me writing for Gusto.

All my records and concert tickets for free. It's a great year for music. Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours" is album of the year. Steely Dan's "Aja" appears. So does "Saturday Night Fever." Punk-rock/New Wave hits the mainstream. The Sex Pistols, the Clash, Talking Heads and Elvis Costello debut. But Rich Stadium concerts? Not so great as previous summers. Blue Oyster Cult with Lynyrd Skynyrd and Ted Nugent. Yes backed up by Bob Seger and J. Geils.